


In Case You Don't Live Forever

by thepocketdragon



Series: Sing to me Instead [10]
Category: Pitch Perfect (Movies)
Genre: Angst, F/F, Future Fic, Medical Procedures, Song fic, bechloe - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-13
Updated: 2021-01-19
Packaged: 2021-03-18 04:21:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 7
Words: 24,477
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28737156
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thepocketdragon/pseuds/thepocketdragon
Summary: Beca always thought time would be on her side. She always thought there would be a right time to finally admit out loud how she feels, but months have turned to weeks have turned to days and hours and- now- she’s left with no choice. She can’t let Chloe go without saying it.Not when it might be the last thing she ever hears.An emotional and angsty short story with themes of physical illness.
Relationships: Chloe Beale & Beca Mitchell, Chloe Beale/Beca Mitchell
Series: Sing to me Instead [10]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2021515
Comments: 48
Kudos: 94





	1. All the Time in the World

**Author's Note:**

> This is a part of the ‘Sing to me Instead’ series in which I listen to a track from Ben Platt’s first album, think about Bechloe and let myself write. 
> 
> This story in particular is fairly dark, sad and angsty in places. Partly that’s because of the lyrics and the song itself, partly because of where I’ve taken the narrative and partly it’s because this is a song I always associated with my grandfather, who sadly died in December. 
> 
> Please excuse any inaccuracies with medical jargon/procedure- although I know a lot about the brain, the physiological side is something I haven’t had to deal with for a number of years so I’m a little rusty! Also, disclaimer, I’m not a neurosurgeon. (That may become rather obvious). 
> 
> TW: medical procedures, mentions of cancer (but not cancer-themed), discussions of death, grief and bereavement.

**Prologue - All the Time in the World**

New York City is at its most pleasant once the snow has melted and the bright sun begins to peek through the clouds. The light seems to lift everything; the colours, the mood. After the darkness and frost of the winter months, the first flowers that bloom along the pathways of Prospect Park bring a kind of joy that nothing else compares to.

Well, nothing else except Chloe Beale.

Beca has long since accepted the fact that Chloe is the one person in the world who makes her happier than any other.

(It had taken her a while to admit to herself that even Stevie Nix and Bob Dylan didn’t bring her the same kind of feeling; that the music they made didn’t make her heart sing in quite the same way as it did when Chloe was humming to herself while putting away laundry or drying the dishes. Chloe isn’t just music. She isn’t just light. She isn’t _just_ anything.

  
She’s everything).

It is strange, Beca thinks, being back in New York. Being back in Brooklyn. It has been two years since she was offered the opportunity to create her own sound, to finally get to call herself a producer. It has been two years since she packed her bags from the tiny apartment that should never have housed three people and began the process of moving to Los Angeles.

It has been the same number of years, minus a handful of days, since she quietly asked Chloe to come with her. Chloe, who had an offer waiting from the vet school at UCLA should she wish to take it. Chloe, who would be up to her eyeballs in student debt and earning very little for the next few years, who would need somewhere to live and someone to live with.

Chloe, who Beca knew she couldn’t live without.

Losing her would have been one change too many. And, so, without much discussion at all, they had made the move together to a two-bed duplex in West Hollywood which they had filled with music and laughter and memories every day since.

Maybe that’s why it feels weird being in New York again. This is the place where everything started; it was the beginning of Beca’s real life. Her life after college. Her life after Jesse. Her life with music and with freedom and with Chloe. It is hard to separate Brooklyn from Chloe Beale. It has occurred to Beca on more than once occasion just how instrumental Chloe had been in setting her on her path. It was her encouragement she needed; her approval she sought.

This park, the place she has chosen to wander around between meetings, brings it all back. She can hear every word they spoke between these trees; every muttered admission of fear, every loud exclamation of frustration, every furtive question about the future and what comes next. New York was the place where they became who they are.

It is instinct to want Chloe with her. Beca can’t deny it anymore, can’t help but admit how much she misses her. She doesn’t fight the urge to pull out her phone and FaceTime her best friend. 

The moment she sees her, something settles within Beca.

She had found it strange, feeling homesick in a place that had- technically- been her home for so long. The clamouring need to get herself back to the west coast, she could admit in her own head, had nothing to do with the city and everything to do with who was there.

Waiting.

For her.

It had taken her a long time to realise that homesickness and missing Chloe were one and the same.

It had taken her longer to realise that it was because, for her, Chloe Beale _is_ home.

Beca doesn’t feel guilty as she begins the walk back to the office block where a music executive in an expensive suit is waiting to try and tempt her into leaving her label for his. She doesn’t feel guilty for the way she wishes time would go faster. She doesn’t feel guilty for wanting to shake the hourglass in the hope that a few more grains of sand might just slip through and she can get herself home quicker. She doesn’t feel guilty about any of it. She’s young. She’s got all the time in the world to sit back and to be young and enjoy life in LA, to think about what comes next and weigh up her options.

She’s got time to sit with the feeling that washes over her when she thinks about Chloe. The feeling she gets when she sees flowers in bloom in the morning sunlight, or when she inhales the scent of chamomile tea.

She’s got time to work out what it all means.

Time to find the right words.

Time to work out if, as she is beginning to suspect, it isn’t a coincidence that she can’t write a song without thinking of her.

It’s a big question, one that has been hanging over Beca for longer than she would care to admit. There’s a fine line between friendship and more. A fine line she’s been careful not to overstep for so many years; terrified that she’s the only one. Scared that saying anything, questioning or pushing, would mean losing Chloe.

She can’t bear the thought of not having her in her life.

And so she sits with the feeling in her chest and they carry on as they always have.

After all, they’ve got time.


	2. Years

**Part 1 - Years.**

It feels strange, still, for Beca to leave the luxury of the private car that picks her up from the airport and walk into her home. It’s as if she leaves a version of herself- the version other people think of when they picture her- at the door. Inside her apartment, she’s just Beca. Tired, aching, desperate for a night of good wine and bad TV Beca.

Inside the house, it’s as if nothing has changed. There are pictures on the walls that were in the apartment in Brooklyn she had shared with Chloe and Amy before they moved. There are mugs in the cupboard that were in their house at Barden University. There are photographs and certificates and trophies on their shelves, all of which serve as a reminder of just how much of their lives they have spent together.

In a way, the house is like a time capsule.

Beca likes how everything stops.

There is no rush here.

It’s just her and Chloe and the little sanctuary they’ve created; the place they can both go to retreat from the real world, filled with years of memories and the promise of more.

Nothing can get them there.

Nothing changes.

It’s a vacuum.

“Chloe?”

The apartment is quiet. For a moment, Beca wonders if Chloe has gone out, but her keys are in their usual spot and she’s certain she can hear the tinny sound of something- a movie or a TV show- echoing faintly down the corridor. Leaving her case in the entryway, Beca wanders towards Chloe’s door and knocks gently.

“Chlo? It’s me.”

Nothing.

Slowly, she pushes it open.

The blue light coming from the TV gives Chloe a strange glow. It creates shadows that shouldn’t be there and makes her features look both bigger and smaller than they are in reality.

Her eyes are closed and her breathing is gentle. It isn’t a particularly unexpected sight. Although it’s usually Beca who takes daytime naps, Chloe has been working hard at the clinic and Beca knows she’s been helping to write a new syllabus for an undergrad elective with one of her tutors in the spare time she doesn’t really have. She probably needs the rest.

However, it is impossible to fight the urge to get closer, even if it risks disturbing her. Slowly, Beca peels back the covers and kicks off her shoes. Clambering into the bed next to her best friend, she feels Chloe sigh against her. Beca has long since become accustomed to Chloe’s lack of boundaries around personal space. She has long since resigned herself to the fact that she likes being close to Chloe. She has long since admitted, although never out loud, how much she likes the smell of her shampoo and how, when Chloe is falling asleep and her fingers curl in on themselves, Beca’s heart skips a beat.

Chloe knows, though.

It’s the reason she smiles every time Beca is the one to initiate a cuddle. Every time she pulls Chloe back and mumbles “I wasn’t done yet” into her hair. Every time Beca slips into bed with her in the middle of the night and refuses to admit she is afraid of thunderstorms.

It’s one of the many things that go unsaid.

  
It’s one of the many things that are normal in their apartment; in their vacuum where it’s just the two of them.

As Beca moves to shuffle down the bed and rest her head on one of the many decorative pillows Chloe insists on placing against the headboard, she reaches around and holds Chloe to her.

Two blue eyes open gently.

A sleepy smile grows.

A hand reaches out and takes hers.

It is the words “you’re here” that turn up the volume on the song in Beca’s heart.

She leans in and presses a soft kiss to a waiting forehead.

“I’m here.”

There’s a pause, then. A moment. The hourglass still filters, one grain of sand falling at a time.

“You… you good?”

It isn’t as sincere as Beca would like it to sound, but she doesn’t have to try with Chloe. She could speak any language in the world and Chloe would know what she wanted to say.

She gets a shrug in return.

It would be a neutral response, something fairly passive, if it weren’t for the fact that Chloe smiles more than anyone else Beca has ever met. If it weren’t for the fact that, of the two of them, Chloe is the one who uses the words ‘I’m fine’ when she isn’t (and says it with her eyes).

Beca’s always quite liked the way she tells little lies to protect her.

That said, if the shrug she’s being offered is Chloe trying to make whatever is going on seem _good,_ she’s worried.

“Chlo? Talk to me, sweetie. What… what’s happening?”

“Nothing.” Her voice, Beca realises, is croaky. Weak. She takes a deep breath and licks her dry lips before she speaks again. “Just sleepy. Headache.”

It takes a moment for Beca to think about the last time Chloe was like this. What the problem had been. She leans back into the pillow, feeling Chloe’s weight on her shoulder as she rests against her and her mind takes her back to senior year; to the way Chloe had responded to the stress of repeating Russian Lit and losing their title.

It doesn’t take long for a wave of concern to crash over Beca. “Chlo, when did you last eat?”

From the way sapphire eyes dart away from her face, Beca knows she isn’t going to like the answer.

* * *

Beca always hated leaving.

It was never the going that she didn’t like, but the way she instinctively worried about coming back. Coming back and not knowing what might have changed.

Her mom was the worst for it when she was a kid. She would leave for a weekend at her dad’s place and come back to find her bedroom a different colour and all of her stuff in different places. There was no respect for her system; no understanding of the fact that everything in her little space had its own spot and Beca knew exactly where everything went.

It’s different with Chloe, just like everything else. She’s never had to worry before. The house stays the same. Sure, occasionally she’ll come back to find Chloe has put all of the mugs in the left-hand cupboard or that she’s finally procrastinated to the level at which she has re-organised the bookcase so that everything is arranged by colour instead of name, but it still feels the same.

The apartment, she realises, was never what she should have been worrying about.

Not when, after three days away and two days back, Chloe has done nothing but sleep and Beca has no idea what happened while she was away. Not when Chloe hasn’t been awake long enough to give her an answer.

It’s worrying.

Not just the idea of Chloe being quiet or tired or sick or even hurt.

It’s the idea that there’s something going on with Chloe that Beca has no idea about; that- despite rationally and logically having known it for years- they live separate lives. That they might have secrets.

That’s the anxiety that is swimming around Beca’s head as she stares restlessly at the ceiling.

That’s the anxiety that sits within her when she hears Chloe get up.

That’s the anxiety that she pushes to the back of her mind when she hears a door open followed by the sound of retching.

Then, as she rushes out of her own room and down the hallway to find Chloe knelt on the cold bathroom floor, face ashen and eyes brimming with tears, it’s replaced with a new one.

“Chloe? Oh, sweetie, it’s alright.”

It’s instinctual, the way she drops to her knees and pulls red hair back before rubbing over tense shoulders. Chloe’s back is tight and Beca can’t help the pang of fear as she registers just how sharply the bumps of her spine stick out.

“Has this been happening a lot?”

Chloe has a bottle of water with her, which kind of answers Beca’s question for her. She sits back, wipes her mouth and takes a small sip before she nods slowly. It takes another moment before she can form words. Each one lands heavy, as if to demonstrate just how much effort it seems to take to speak out loud.

“Can… can’t eat. Just comes back up.”

In the harsh light of the bathroom, Chloe’s skin is pallid and covered with a sheen of sweat. The circles under her eyes are almost purple and the smattering of freckles that cover her usually rosy cheeks have all but disappeared. Beca swallows. This person isn’t Chloe. Not on the outside. Something, she realises, is wrong. Very wrong.

“Bec, I… I think I’m ready to go back to bed.”

Chloe tries to pull herself up, her legs shaking as she straightens them. Beca is behind her, holding her steady as she walks to the sink to wash her hands and face. Without a word, without a question, just a silent acknowledgement, Beca leads Chloe back to her bedroom and tucks her in. There’s a moment, just one, as she watches her settle, her eyes beginning to close, where Beca doubts herself. Doubts whether her presence is something that is wanted right now.

“Bec, stay. Please.”

Beca can’t help but smile a little. Chloe has, after all, always known her better than she’s known herself. She slides in beside her, relaxing a little as she senses the beat of Chloe’s pulse and feels her chest rise and fall as her breaths slow and deepen.

“Thank you.”

* * *

It feels like only minutes have passed when Beca’s eyes open the next morning. She had fought sleep at first, and then sleep had fought her. Every time she felt herself drifting off, she felt the urge to wake up and check on Chloe. In the deep darkness of the middle of the night, every sound, every movement was enough to pull her from sleep just in case it was Chloe getting up again. She isn’t sure how long she managed to sleep for, but she doubts it was more than a few hours.

Glancing to her left, Beca realises that- despite the limited, broken sleep- she still probably looks better than Chloe.

Chloe who is pale and weak and looks impossibly small.

Chloe who clutches at the sheets like she’s in pain.

Chloe who, Beca wonders, might have a better idea of what is happening than she’s letting on.

There’s a mark, red and textured, on the back of Chloe’s arm. Beca hadn’t noticed it in the dim light, but now it’s there and it’s big and it looks like a friction burn. It comes with its own series of questions.

Questions about whether someone has hurt Chloe. Questions about whether Chloe is hiding. Questions about whether something has happened that she isn’t talking about.

* * *

It’s an odd feeling, the sense of distrust that is forming in her head. She is used to it with other people, maybe that’s why its such a natural instinct, but never usually with Chloe.

She’s never had a reason not to trust her.

Even when she barged into her shower in her freshman year, even when she sent them all out into the woods where there were warning signs about actual live bears, even when they wound up sitting on the dock wrapped in blankets after their best friend’s father took them hostage, Beca has trusted Chloe. After all, she has always wanted the best for her; always fought for her.

Distrust tastes bitter.

So does the coffee, but Beca’s gulping it down like it’s medicinal.

Slowly, she feels the cogs of her brain begin to move, thoughts coming to the fore as the caffeine does its job. She picks up a banana and eats half of it quickly before making her way to the bathroom to disinfect and clean everything.

It’s as she’s putting the bleach back in the cupboard under the sink that she spots something that triggers a thought.

A box.

A pink box.

A box she knows doesn’t belong to her.

The image doesn’t leave her mind as she showers.

It plagues her as she pulls on her clothes and dries her hair, throwing it up into a messy ponytail.

It nags at her as she makes some toast and puts the other half of the banana on a plate.

It’s at her throat as she pushes open Chloe’s bedroom door and puts the tray down on the covers.

It’s at her lips as Chloe sits up and brushes her hair out of her face.

It’s in the air before she can fight it.

It’s in the air, in the universe, and in Chloe’s ears before Beca knows it’s happened.

“Chloe… I just need… are you pregnant?”

For a moment, she sees nothing but panic in blue eyes.

Beca manages to count to six before the covers are flying back off the bed and Chloe is racing towards the bathroom, a hand cupped over her mouth.

She doesn’t miss how, this time, she locks the door behind her.

* * *

Beca hates how the idea of Chloe having a kid makes her feel. She hates that it sends her into a spiral she doesn’t know how to escape from. It’s a mix of anger and disgust, frustration, panic and guilt. Every single part of her brain seems to be experiencing a different, conflicting emotion.

At the fore, however, is worry.

Worry that, from being in their little vacuum, suddenly things are going to change.

Worry that change means losing Chloe.

Or, more truthfully, that change means not being able to have Chloe to herself.

She knows how selfish she’s being, but Beca doesn’t think she can help it. Not when she’s starting to come to terms, finally, with the idea that doing something about the way her chest constricts when Chloe Beale smiles at her could be worth the risk.

It had never dawned on her before that there would ever come a time when she was too late.

Maybe, Beca thinks, living in a vacuum has its downsides.

It’s as she’s letting herself wallow in self-pity for a moment that Chloe emerges, silently, from the corridor. She’s wrapped in a blanket and Beca can see that she’s wearing her old Barden hoodie with the hood up underneath it. She walks slowly, carefully, towards the couch. There’s a quiet movement, Beca shuffling to the side to make space for Chloe to lay herself down, moving a cushion onto her lap for her to rest her head on.

A hand reaches out to push the green hood down, to brush over frizzy wisps of auburn.

Chloe settles. She takes a deep breath before she speaks.

Beca doesn’t miss the way she can feel her bones, even through the blanket.

“I’m not pregnant, Beca.”

It’s stern, but not angry. That’s the first thing Beca senses. The second, she realises, is that Chloe sounds sad.

“Did… did you think…” she can’t quite get the question out.

“It would be a miracle. As in, second coming of Christ miracle” Chloe says in a voice barely more than a whisper. Beca can’t ignore the sense of reassurance at her words; not in what she says, but in how she says it. She sounds like Chloe. “But…” Chloe’s breath whistles through her nose, “I guess it would have been nice to know there would be an end if it was.” It’s impossible to ignore the wince as Chloe swallows. Beca doesn’t need to see her to know that she’s crying. She can feel the tears soaking through her pants. “I feel so sick. I’m so tired and everything hurts.” Her rattling breath makes Beca want to scoop Chloe up in her arms. Instead, she reaches for her hand and squeezes. “I just want someone to make it go away.”

When Chloe speaks again, the words hit Beca.

She hears them echoing in her mind.

“I want it all to stop.”

* * *

It’s Chloe’s words that continue to repeat themselves, over and over, in Beca’s mind the following day.

She answers emails in bed first thing. There’s one from a producer she’s collaborating with at the top of her inbox. It’s an email she’s been waiting for. She scans the words before groaning out loud. She had hoped that the amendments for the track they’ve been working on would be easy enough to complete without having to go into the studio, that she could use the limited equipment she has at her disposal in her apartment. No such luck.

Beca showers quickly and pulls on the clean clothes from the top of her ‘put me away’ pile. Chloe’s door is closed and she doesn’t want to disturb her, so she scribbles a note to leave on the fridge before grabbing her keys and heading out of the door.

The track is simple enough and the task doesn’t require a huge amount of concentration. It’s something Beca is thankful for. She’s still not sleeping well. Every sound still startles her. Every whine of the wind against her window that sounds like it could possibly be Chloe is enough to wake her. Beca can’t help the way she keeps checking her phone while she works.

She’s past the point of being self-conscious about anything to do with Chloe.

Especially not when she’s worried.

As she finishes the tweaks to the track and forwards yet another ‘final’ copy to the artist and the exec from the label, her anxiety comes back to the forefront of her mind. It puts everything on fast-forward.

She’s shutting her laptop and rushing out of the office within minutes, not even stopping to check if there are any good snacks in the meeting room that she can steal.

She’s in the car and parking outside the store before the song playing on the radio has even come to an end.

She needs to find something for Chloe. Something that says ‘I’m here and I’m listening and I don’t care what it is, you can tell me’. She keeps thinking about Chloe’s words and picturing the burn she was sure she saw on her arm. She sees her pale face and her tired eyes and she just wants to do something to make her smile.

Flowers, she thinks. Flowers will be nice. Nothing to eat or drink, although she picks up some Gatorade and a pack of Power Bars just in case. Flowers, though, she thinks, will be nice.

The flowers are nice. Simple, but pretty.

They sit in their cellophane on the kitchen counter as Beca walks around the house calling Chloe’s name.

She shoves them into the first vase she finds, filling it with water to keep them alive, as she realises there’s no response and checks her phone for messages.

They’re the only thing she can stare at as panic begins to rise in her throat when Chloe doesn’t answer her call.

The clock on the kitchen wall is ticking. It’s loud. A reminder that, even when everything else is still and silent, time marches forward. Each tick that passes cranks up the volume on her anxiety until all she can hear is Chloe’s voice saying “I want it all to stop.”

Over.

And over.

And over.

She doesn’t know where to start. She doesn’t know where Chloe would go. She has no idea whether she’s even well enough to go far. The possibilities are endless and Beca can’t decide where to look. She’s so weighed down with indecision that she finds herself stuck.

She can’t move.

Time moves instead.

Keys turn in the lock.

The door thunders open.

The vase smashes on the floor as Beca leaps out of her seat, the late afternoon sun contorting Chloe’s shadow.

“Did I scare you?”

Beca’s nodding before she realises that Chloe is looking at the flowers on the floor, surrounded by water and broken glass.

She’s talking about her entrance, not her exit.

Beca doesn’t have the words to explain how far she had gone in her head; how desperately worried she had been. What she had imagined Chloe might have meant with her ominous words.

She focuses on cleaning up, on making sure every shard of glass is off the ground. She grabs the flowers and stands, ready to hand them over to Chloe.

It’s only then that she realises she can still hear the clock ticking.

Silence is not usually something one associates with Chloe Beale.

She is sat, chewing on her lip, blue eyes dancing nervously over Beca’s features. It’s hard not to notice the way she glances down at the flowers. It’s hard not to notice the way she picks at her fingers.

“These are for you.” Beca holds them out. She feels ridiculous, like she’s some lovesick cartoon girl on the front of a Valentine’s Day card, but she has to fill the silence somehow. Chloe takes the bunch from her and strokes her fingers over the petals. Before she can speak, Beca finds her courage. “Where were you today? Did you go into the clinic?”

When Chloe looks directly at her, Beca can see fear.

She knows something is about to change.

She wants time to stop, just for a moment. She wants the world to stop so that she can process this before she presses ‘play’.

The sound of the clock reminds her that what she’s asking is impossible.

She counts to three before Chloe speaks.

“I went to the doctor.”

Another three.

“I thought it was my nodes again.”

Beca isn’t sure if the beat she’s counting is the ticking of the clock or the thundering of her pulse.

She makes it to two this time.

“The doctor wants to do more tests.”

The need to push the pause button is stronger than it’s ever been before when Chloe speaks again.

One.

“Tomorrow.”

* * *

“I thought it was my nodes.”

Chloe repeats herself as she breaks the fragile silence. She can barely look at Beca as she speaks, uncertain eyes giving at best a fleeting glance.

“I… I don’t know why I didn’t say before.” Her voice seems a little stronger than it had been. Beca’s thankful for that, at least. “I… I know I said I had a headache, but it’s not just an ache. It’s, ah, it’s like I’ve got this shooting pain in the back of my throat that goes all the way up into my head.”

Beca takes in every word Chloe says. She consciously pushes down every anxious, panicked thought because she knows, above all else, she needs to listen. She needs to try and understand. They’re on the couch, now. The flowers sit in an old measuring jug on the coffee table, still in their cellophane wrapping. Beca had pulled a blanket out of the basket they keep by the fireplace, draping it over both of them. Underneath it, their feet touch.

“The doctor said it could be nodes, that they could have come back although I’m not singing competitively so…” Beca doesn’t miss the way Chloe has to stop and take a particularly deep breath. She closes her eyes and Beca resists the urge to count. All she knows is that Chloe takes a moment to focus when she opens them again.

“All good?”

She already knows the answer, but it’s become a habit. Chloe takes the cue to turn around and lean back, her head resting on Beca’s shoulder as she reclines against her body. Beca’s response is automatic; the instinctual way she reaches out to brush Chloe’s hair back, to comfort her, is something she’s always done. Like everything else in their little bubble, it’s something that grew over time. Something that neither of them have ever explained out loud.

“The tests he wants to do tomorrow,” Beca feels Chloe tense up, “they… they’re not on my throat. He wants to do an MRI scan on my brain.” Beca wants to jump in, to give reassurance or say something, but she has no idea what Chloe needs. She lets her talk. “Some of my symptoms aren’t something you’d associate with nodes. Sure, the throat pain and the headache maybe, but…”

When Chloe takes a breath and turns slightly to face Beca, there are tears in her eyes. Before anything more is said, Beca is reaching out to brush over her cheek.

“It’s alright.”

Chloe’s shoulders rise and fall dramatically as she sighs. “Please don’t be mad at me?”

Beca’s thumb caresses Chloe’s jaw before taking a lock of loose hair and tucking it behind her ear. “Never” she whispers. “I can never be mad at you.”

Blue eyes flutter closed as Chloe gets her words out. “I may have been ignoring some symptoms. Or, well, I think I put it down to stress. Which, I know, I should have done something about. But I thought it was just dizziness because I wasn’t eating right and I was tired from working so much. And I thought the throwing up was, well, because I felt so dizzy.” The blanket is pulled back and Chloe is unbuttoning her jeans before Beca can ask why. She pulls them down her thigh until Beca can see the outline of a dark purple bruise.

“Chloe!” When the redhead winces, Beca apologises and lowers her volume. “What happened?”

“In the bathroom. When… when you were away. I was brushing my teeth and my head was hurting and then…” There is a look in Chloe’s eyes again. Beca can see the fear. She takes a short breath. “I blacked out. When I woke up, I looked down and, well.” Chloe pulls up her sleeve to show the bottom of the mark Beca had seen on her arm. “This one was when I slipped on the stairs. The carpet burned me. I… I got so dizzy all of a sudden that I felt my legs go from under me. Before I knew it, I was on the floor.”

Beca’s head is swimming. She has too many questions and not enough answers and the fear she can see in Chloe’s eyes is certainly reflected in her own. It takes a moment for her to compose herself.

“And that’s when you called the doctor?”

Chloe shakes her head. “No. I got an emergency cancellation today. I was just lucky that the doctor I saw had just finished his neuro rotation. He… he called in his old supervisor to see me and he asked more questions. I honestly hadn’t put two and two together.” Beca takes Chloe’s hand without thinking and squeezes it as tightly as she dares. “I just thought I was exhausted from school.”

“So, tomorrow.”

Chloe’s tongue pokes out to lick at her lips. “Tomorrow” she says gently, as if she’s hoping it will never come. “Tomorrow I have to go to the hospital and I have to have my brain scanned and, Bec, I didn’t want to ask because I know how busy you are but…”

Beca’s leaning in and pressing a kiss to Chloe’s cheek before she can finish her question. “Of course I’ll go with you.” She smiles lightly as she feels Chloe lean back into her. “I have all the time in the world for you. You know that.”

The ticking clock in the kitchen echoes out.

For a moment, Beca wonders why it feels- suddenly- like it’s counting down to something.

In her head, she makes a decision.

She needs to tell Chloe how she feels.

She’s sick of wasting time.


	3. Months

**Part 2- Months**

Hospitals smell of misery and disinfectant.

Beca has never liked them. She doesn’t like the way the overhead lighting makes everything too bright. She doesn’t like the way the floor squeaks under her feet. She doesn’t like the ominous distant sounds of buzzers and bells and alarms that she doesn’t understand.

  
She doesn’t like the memories.

Hospitals remind her of death, that’s the crux of it.

Death and pain and not much else.

As she glances to her side, to Chloe, she tries her best to forget everything she automatically pictures the moment she walks into the space. She can’t be that person, not now. She knows she has to be strong. Positive. Maybe she’ll even manage to force a smile. Chloe will know, though. She always does. She always laughs when Beca tries to use her own little strategies to stay calm.

It’s ironic, she thinks, that her idea of strength is based entirely on Chloe. The person she now has to be strong for. The person who needs her is the person who crafted the armour she wears.

Instead of saying anything, she takes Chloe’s hand in hers and holds it tight.

“This gown is scratchy.”

It shouldn’t surprise Beca that Chloe, even in the state she is in, can still make her smile.

“Alright,” the door opens to reveal a young doctor. Beca assesses him quickly. She notices the way he glances down to where their hands are still clasped together. She wonders, for a moment, if it changes his approach. She lets herself imagine that he thinks they’re together. She kind of likes that he doesn’t seem surprised. “Okay Miss Beale. This is a contrast injection. It’s just so we can see better on the scan, nothing to worry about. Although if you start to feel nauseous or anything changes, please tell us straight away.” The needle is back out of Chloe’s arm before he finishes his sentence. “We’re just getting everything set up. The nurse will be down to collect you when we’re ready.”

There’s a moment of quiet as the door closes.

A vacuum, Beca thinks. Just the two of them.

“Bec, I’m scared.”

The confession shakes the foundations of Beca’s world for a second. She blinks back a shock of unexpected tears.

“Is it bad that I want to say, like, obviously?” She kind of likes that Chloe nudges her side. “It is scary, Chlo. I’m not going to deny that. But… but you’re the strongest person I know and if anyone can get through whatever happens in there, it’s you.”

Beca doesn’t think about it too much, she can’t think about how she’s terrified not only of the scan itself, but of what happens after. Instead, she takes a deep breath and turns to look into the eyes of her best friend.

“You’re not alone, Chlo. I’m here, alright? Whatever happens, I’m here.”

Beca doesn’t realise she’s tapping two fingers over her heart until she sees Chloe doing the same.

“You’re here, too.”

“I love you.”

It’s whispered. A confession, almost. Beca repeats it to herself as she watches Chloe be led out of the room. She likes the way the words feel. She likes how right they sound in her head.

Maybe it’s time, she thinks. Time for her to be brave and strong and, finally, just say it.

The door closes behind her.

Beca tries to push down the thought that sits at the forefront of her mind. The thought that, when it opens again, everything will change.

Maybe, she thinks, she’ll be the one to change things.

* * *

There’s a bruise on Chloe’s arm from where the nurse took her blood. That’s the thing Beca focuses on as she watches her best friend’s hand move over her chest. She watches as she taps two fingers over her heart.

Beca does it back.

She can’t squeeze her hand, not really, because of how they’re sat, but they can communicate.

It’s a silly gesture, but it means something. Beca thinks of it less like ‘I love you’ and more like ‘I carry you’. At the moment, she wishes she could. She wishes, more than anything, that she could take whatever is going on in Chloe’s body and in her brain and just… take it. Hold it. Relieve the weight and the burden just for a moment.

“Okay, Miss Beale.”

Beca isn’t sure she likes this neuro guy. He’s far too tall for her liking and his eyes are the kind of icy blue that makes her think of White Walkers. Still, Chloe smiles at him like she isn’t his patient, like she isn’t battered and bruised and pale and sick. She smiles and nods and listens like he’s telling her an anecdote at a dinner party instead of delivering the news he does.

Beca could have gone another 30 years without ever hearing the jargon that is being spouted at them. It starts with ‘glossopharyngeal neuralgia’ and a picture of what she soon learns is the cranial nerve that somehow has something to do with the throat. There is talk of arteries and movement and pressure and Chloe nods along. It takes a moment for Beca to remember how much Chloe knows about this kind of thing from her job. She wonders whether she would prefer to be completely aware of what is being said or to stay in the dark. Chloe has always liked to ask questions. It might be comforting to her to be able to picture how it all fits together.

Beca decides she prefers not knowing. Or, rather, knowing just enough.

She could have gone another 100 years or longer without ever seeing an MRI scan of her best friend’s brain.

Beca can’t unsee it, though.

She can’t unsee the red circle that the doctor draws around the curved line and the weird white blank space behind it.

She can’t unsee the arrow he draws to point out the grey blob next to it.

She wishes she could unhear the words the moment they come out of his mouth.

Words like ‘arachnoid cyst’ and ‘nodule’ and ‘biopsy’.

It’s when he says the word ‘tumour’ that Beca feels her body lurch forwards. She stands. Chloe’s hand finds hers and holds her tight. Beca hears the beating in her ears and hopes it’s her pulse and not the clock ticking, counting down.

“It looks like it’s small. The cyst in front of it is the thing causing most of your symptoms. We’ll remove as much as we can, send a sample of the cells off for testing and then we’ll look at treatment options if we need to.”

“Treatment options?” Chloe’s voice cracks. Neither of them have spoken for a long time.

“For this size of tumour I’d usually recommend surgery as a first port of call. If there are cells we can’t remove, then radiotherapy would be the next best option. Chemotherapy would only be as a last resort, and only if it’s malignant.” The word alone makes Beca feel sick. She can’t imagine how Chloe feels.

“When?”

Beca isn’t entirely sure what she’s asking but the word is out of her mouth and she leaves it up to the good doctor to interpret it.

“As soon as possible. Just in case.”

When she looks across at Chloe, Beca feels the colour drain from her face. In her seat, wearing an old, grey UCLA sweater that is far too big, she looks like a child.

Innocent. 

Small.

It’s so unfair, Beca thinks. It’s unfair that someone so pure, so kind, is the one who is sick. It’s unfair that, suddenly, time feels like it’s moving faster and faster. It’s unfair that Chloe is a student and has crappy income and debts to pay and nobody ever thinks about the possibility of having to factor in somehow paying for brain surgery before graduation.

“If there’s a way the surgery can be done privately, if that’s quicker or easier, I can pay.” Beca can feel Chloe’s eyes on her. She’s scared to turn and look at her, suspecting that they’re as full of tears as hers are. “Sorry, I don’t know if that’s something… it’s not like I’m trying to buy you… I just…” This is ridiculous, Beca thinks. “Sorry. I don’t really know what the protocol is for this.”

There’s a dismissive wave and a half-smile and then, suddenly, they’re at the door and Beca has a bunch of pamphlets and a small card with a picture of that self-same doctor on the front.

They leave in silence. Out of the door. Down the corridor. Down the stairs. Through the entrance. Towards the car.

“Bec, you don’t…”

It’s the first thing Chloe says, or tries to say, once they are safely inside the car.

Beca turns to face her best friend. She can see the contrast of red-rimmed eyes against pallid skin, purple rings under bright blue irises. Both of them, she knows, are moments away from losing their cool. The dam is threatening to burst. It takes all of her strength and all of her composure to take a deep, shuddering breath and speak.

“I do, Chlo. Of course I do. I’d do anything for you.” She pauses. The words ‘I don’t know what I’d do if I lost you’ die on her lips. Instead, she pulls her best friend into a tight hug and wills herself to stay strong for just a moment longer as Chloe’s hot tears soak into her t-shirt.

Chloe needs her.

Chloe needs Beca to give her time.

Beca will give her every single moment she has.

She just hopes it will be enough.

* * *

The house feels different from the moment they walk through the door. It’s a subtle change, really, and Beca isn’t entirely certain it isn’t all in her head.

Maybe it is.

She’s on edge, she can admit, most of the time. She reaches for things on the higher shelves instead of asking Chloe to do it. She cooks and cleans and makes tea and fetches the mail. When Chloe is studying instead of in the clinic, Beca works from home. She sets up the table as a makeshift office and orders in nice lunches from the deli they both like. Nothing is natural. Her auto-pilot is switched off. For once in her life, Beca thinks through every single action she makes. Not for herself, though. Never for herself.

Everything is for Chloe.

There is a balance to be struck between making things feel normal and making a fuss.

It’s hard, especially now she knows there is an uninvited third guest at the table. A guest who, if the doctor’s estimates are right, may have been there, silent, unknown and growing at a snail’s pace, since before Chloe barged into Beca’s shower that fateful night back in Atlanta.

It’s hard because they have to talk about it. Chloe has to tell her parents and her bosses and her tutors at the university. She has to use words like ‘malignant’ and ‘biopsy’ and ‘surgery’ and somehow she does it while making it sound like she’s just going in to have a tooth pulled. She bats back every offer people make to come and visit, smiling at Beca as she holds the phone to her ear and says things like “mom, I have Beca to take care of me. I’ll be fine” with a smile and an assured look in her eyes. The way Chloe looks at her like she’s strong enough to deal with this, like she’s somehow decided she’s qualified to care for her in this way, makes her wonder whether the growth (she can’t say the ’T’ word without feeling sick) in her head hasn’t messed with her eyesight. Or her memory. Or her judgement.

It makes her reel back a little because, if anything, it’s Chloe who is the one of them who could manage something like this. Sure, Beca is stoic in a crisis but it’s not because she’s strong, it’s because she’s frozen.

And, when she is stuck, it’s Chloe she looks for. It’s Chloe who leads the way.

Chloe has always understood Beca best. She has always had an insight, a terrifyingly accurate insight at times, into how her mind works. She can spot triggers and bumps in the road and makes plans to avoid them. She has always been able to talk to Beca in a way she understands, to explain things to her and ask things over her without her getting prickly or anxious.

She has always understood Beca’s limits.

Maybe that’s why it doesn’t come as much of a surprise when she opens the door early one Saturday morning to find Aubrey Posen standing on the other side holding an overnight bag and a bunch of tulips.

“Uh, hi?”

Aubrey takes off her sunglasses, pushing them back until they sit on top of her perfect blonde waves. “I’ll take it from that reaction that Chloe didn’t tell you I was coming?” She pushes into the house. “Close your mouth, Mitchell. It’s unbecoming.”

Chloe is skating across the wooden floor, propelled by her unicorn-emblazoned socks, with her arms wide open. Beca can’t help the yelp that escapes her as she watches her crash into Aubrey and pull her into a desperate hug.

“What?” Chloe lifts her head and Beca can see the teasing look in her eye.

“One, you could have warned me.” Chloe simply shrugs. “Two, need I remind you that you’re having brain surgery soon? Please don’t make me have to call that stupid giant doctor and tell him you’ve hit your head sliding your socks along the floor.”

“The way I see it,” Chloe talks as she takes Aubrey’s bag and places it by the couch, “I’m already having the surgery. What’s a little more damage?”

Beca knows she’s joking, but it doesn’t stop her heart from thundering. It doesn’t stop the sick, anxious feeling from bubbling in her belly. It doesn’t stop her mouth from opening, words tumbling out before she can stop them.

“Don’t say that”. It’s quiet, that’s the first thing she notices. It’s quiet when she speaks and it’s quiet after.

“Sorry. Distasteful.” Beca doesn’t like the fact that Chloe apologises. Not when she’s the one with the damn brain tumour in the first place. “I… I’ll make us a drink. Bree, coffee?”

Aubrey follows Chloe into the kitchen and Beca takes a moment to calm herself.

Over subtle whispers, the clock on the wall ticks as it marks each second that goes by.

_Not now,_ it says. _Not now._

* * *

Beca isn’t stupid, but she is stubborn.

Aubrey’s appearance riles her in a way she can’t quite explain. It shouldn’t, not really, not after all this time. Aubrey is a friend- a good friend- and Beca’s moved way past the stage she went through in which she had genuinely considered Lilly’s offer to make a voodoo doll of the captain for her to stick pins into. Aubrey has been there, for both of them, through so much. She was there when Chloe’s grandpa died and she was there for Beca the day she was nominated for her first ever legit music award. She’s there for birthdays and thanksgivings and she’s close enough to make the journey from her place in Phoenix that she has somehow ended up on both of their emergency contact lists at work.

It makes sense for her to be here.

Still, Beca can’t ignore the sensation in her gut that there’s _something_ about it that doesn’t sit right.

She’s amenable and she stays in the living room to catch up for a bit before she excuses herself. When she does, Beca notices the way Chloe nods approvingly. It is only then that she realises that Chloe hadn’t just invited Aubrey here to spend time with her. No, in true Chloe Beale style, she’s thinking about Beca. She’s giving her space.

She’s giving her time.

Time to read emails and to work on tracks and to try and write a song for herself. Chloe is the only person outside of Beca’s team who knows that, among the increasingly famous names on her roster, there’s the promise of a solo record in her contract. She has- had- two years.

And Chloe has given her time.

Of course, she’s grateful for the space and the opportunity to work and to leave Chloe and Aubrey to talk about the TV shows that Beca definitely doesn’t watch; the shows that she rolls her eyes at but somehow knows the name of every character and their long-lost brother. Beca’s got time to focus on her music or shop for shoes or give up on all of that and lose herself in a wormhole of Vine compilations and clips of people falling off of boats. She can let herself get distracted and think about other things. That’s why Aubrey’s here, she realises. Well, it’s one of the reasons.

Her headphones are clamped to her ears but there is no music playing. Beca can hear the sounds of laughter pealing down the corridor. It hits her, then, that she’s jealous. It’s a bizarre concept, the idea of being jealous of Aubrey Posen. She has never had a reason to. Aubrey is never someone she has wanted to be. She’s highly strung and goes for manicures and doesn’t own a single pair of sweatpants. The kind of life she has is never something Beca has wanted. But, now, she’s the one who is sat laughing with Chloe. She gets to see her smile and gets to be close enough to breathe in her perfume. She gets time.

There’s an ache in Beca’s belly when the thought materialises. All she can think about is what she’s missed. What she’s missing. Hearing Chloe and Aubrey giggling together hurts in a way Beca knows it shouldn’t. It hurts in a way she doesn’t want to think about, but the thought is there and it pains her to admit, but there might be some truth to it.

Chloe is giving her time she might not have to spare.

Beca is wasting the time she has been given, knowing there may not be much to give.

It pains her to admit that, in her head, Aubrey is stealing time.

“Bec?” She puts her headphones on her desk and stands up at Chloe’s call. “Bec, can you come down here?”

By the time she’s halfway down the stairs, she can see the look on her best friend’s face. She can see from Aubrey’s expression that she doesn’t know what’s going on. Neither of them do, until Chloe speaks.

“It… it’s the hospital. They have a cancellation. I… I’m getting the surgery tomorrow.”

The kitchen clock, once again, makes itself known with its incessant beat.

It’s provoking her, Beca thinks. It’s reminding her, sneeringly somehow, that time moves forwards.

Time that might be finite.

Time that is, suddenly, more precious than it has ever been before.

“Holy fucking shit.”

Aubrey nods as Beca flops down onto the couch next to her. “My thoughts exactly.”

* * *

The incessant, annoying ticking of the kitchen clock keeps Beca awake. Well, at least that’s what she blames. Part of her wonders whether it would help if she removed the batteries. Part of her thinks that she’ll just start hearing the same sound from somewhere else. After all, time doesn’t stop.

Not for anyone.

Not for anything.

Not even for love.

Love.

That’s the thought that pulls her out of bed and has her tiptoeing across the landing. Aubrey is a light sleeper, but she’s made herself comfortable on their pull-out couch like she always does and Beca’s fairly certain she couldn’t hear the floorboards creak from down there. Still, she tries to be as quiet as she can as she pushes Chloe’s door open and steps inside.

“I didn’t hear a thunderstorm.”

It’s an old joke between them and it makes Beca sigh. “I think the storm is in my head.” For a moment, she pauses, looking at Chloe. She hadn’t meant to say it out loud. Certainly not in front of Chloe. Still, she shakes her head and smiles and quips back with “tell me about it”.

It’s only when Chloe lifts the corner of the duvet and blinks at her, saying the words “no seriously, come here and tell me” that Beca moves her feet. She feels Chloe shuffling down, moving her pillows to make herself comfortable, and then there’s a hand shoving at her until she’s somehow resting in the crook of an elbow.

“Shouldn’t I be the one holding you?”

Beca can feel Chloe shrug underneath her neck. “I like holding you. I like knowing you can’t escape.”

“The Stockholm syndrome has settled in pretty deep by now, Chlo. I don’t think I’d run even if I could.”

Chloe chooses that moment to lean in, to press a subtle kiss to Beca’s forehead. “Hmm, well I’m not prepared to take the chance right now.”

There’s a silence that washes over them. The room is unusually still, as if everything around them has stopped. It’s only the ridiculously loud kitchen clock that reminds Beca that it’s not possible. Nothing has stopped. Time still moves on, one step at a time. They’re wasting it by sitting there in the dark trying to skirt around the ‘what if’.

“What did I do to deserve you?” It is Chloe who breaks the silence, her voice pensive and gentle. She takes Beca’s hand in hers and holds it up to play with her fingers.

“I think I should be saying that to you.” Beca’s words are honest. Part of her wants to say more, to give Chloe more of her honesty, but she knows in her heart it’s not the right time. She can’t help but fear that, if she chose this moment to finally spout everything when everything is already about to change, Chloe would think it wasn’t genuine. That, somehow, she’d decided it was the right thing to do, like when people propose the moment they find out they’ve knocked someone up.

As she sighs against Chloe’s arm, Beca wishes more than anything she could air these ridiculous thoughts out loud.

Chloe would laugh, she thinks, if it wasn’t about her.

She would laugh and Beca would get to hear it one more time.

One last…

She can’t let herself finish her thought. She physically shakes her head and Chloe stares at her.

“Are you okay?”

  
“Again, pretty sure I should be asking you, Chloe.”

“Stop deflecting. Tell me.”

Beca wishes, sometimes, that Chloe couldn’t read her like a book. To everyone else, she’s been able to put across the front- the illusion- that she’s complicated. She’s War and Peace or Crime and Punishment or another tome of a novel with an ‘and’ in the middle.

She’s not.

Chloe knows she’s not.

In Chloe’s eyes, Beca’s more akin to ‘The Very Hungry Caterpillar’. She’s easy to read and, even if the words don’t make sense, you can work out what’s going on just by looking at the pictures.

“Tell me.”

Beca can’t. She can’t find the right words.

Even if she could, she doesn’t want to.

Anything profound she could say right now, in this room, in this time, would feel too final.

“I just… wanted to be close to you.”

Even if they aren’t the words she wanted to say, Chloe Beale somehow still gets her to tell the truth.

* * *

Profound words still don’t come to Beca the following morning.

In fact, for a good few seconds, no words come at all.

Chloe is laid on a hospital bed, gown on. She’s wearing socks that come up to her knees and, somehow, she still looks good.

Better than Beca, at least.

“Hey.” Chloe yanks at her hand. Beca’s feet stutter against the squeaky floor as she feels herself being pulled in close. It takes all of her strength, just like it always does, not to get lost in deep blue eyes. “Do you have a crush on that doctor or something? Ever since he left you’ve been… weird.”

Aubrey, sat in the corner, smiles and rolls her eyes. “Never change, Chlo. Please. Never change.”

Beca closes her eyes at that.

_I don’t care if you change._

_Just come back to me._

She tries to find an excuse, to make a joke, but that part of her brain is closed for business. Her only options are ‘don’t leave me’ or ‘I’m in love with you’ and there’s no in-between.

Before she can summon the courage to say either of them, Chloe’s being wheeled out of the door.

Beca’s hand flies up to her chest and she smiles when she watches Chloe do the same.

Two taps.

Beca isn’t sure she needs words.

Not when actions can be so loud.

Aubrey, as usual, takes control of all of the admin. She calls Chloe’s parents and her brother to let them know she’s gone down to surgery and gives them an ETA for the next update from the doctor. She explains the procedure to calm Chloe’s mom and gives her reassurances of when she’ll be able to talk to her daughter once it’s all over. She messages the Bellas on their group chat with a brief update and the promise of a video call once Chloe is up to it.

Beca is just about able to check her emails, but time seems to go so slowly that she’s done before she is ready to be finished.

Aubrey is staring blankly at her phone, too, and Beca understands.

Neither of them are good when they’re not busy.

They don’t do spare time.

Beca fills hers with musical projects and Aubrey fills hers with things like pilates and half marathons and business investment side-hustles that seem to make her plenty of money. They’re very different people on the surface, but Beca thinks they’re probably quite similar underneath it all. Maybe that’s why Chloe likes them both so much. Maybe that’s why she chose them.

Maybe that’s why they’re both sat here.

It makes her smile, which is something that clearly catches Aubrey off guard from the way she blinks at her. It takes Beca a moment to find the right way to explain her thoughts.

“She’s… she’s the reason we’re both here, you know. Like, she chose us. She forced this” Beca gestures between them, “to happen. Isn’t that crazy? She’s, like, the reason.” She hears herself and hopes. To her credit, Aubrey doesn’t acknowledge just how corny and just how ridiculous she sounds. She lets it slide and, instead, she raps her fingers against her knee.

“What would she say if she could see us right now?” Aubrey’s question echoes in the empty room they have been shoved into while they wait.

Beca leans back until her head hits the cold, painted brick wall. She stares up at the ceiling until the fluorescent light hurts her eyes and leaves her seeing white rings on everything. “I think she’d laugh at how we’re both spinning out without her. I think… I think she’d find it funny, but she’d take anything we said about how amazing she is and turn it back on us and how special we are. That’s just… what she does.”

“She does.”

Beca pauses and glances at Aubrey. “This sucks.”

“I know.”

“Like, of all people? Chloe?”

“I know.”

“I know people say that, like, life is unfair, but this takes the…”

“I know.”

Beca can feel Aubrey growing frustrated. She takes a breath and folds her hands in her lap. “Sorry” she mutters, “turns out I talk a lot when I’m nervous.”

Aubrey nods. “I guess, when there’s something that neither of you want to talk about, there’s two ways to cope. You either make enough noise to drown it out or you don’t say anything at all.”

“I wish I’d said more” Beca whispers, hoping Aubrey doesn’t hear her. It’s impossible not to think of the list of things Beca wishes she had said. The words she could have uttered had she been brave enough. She wishes she had been honest enough with herself, honest enough to admit that there is a part of her that is terrified of the prospect of living without Chloe Beale. It isn’t a selfish notion, not really. It’s truthful. Right now, it’s the second-biggest truth of them all. The reason, Beca realises, is the first.

There’s a panic building within her as time moves forward.

The fear at the core of it all is that she’s waited too long.

Time isn’t on her side, not right now, and she might not have long enough to write the song in her heart and let Chloe hear it.

There’s a lump forming in her throat when she realises that Chloe might not even know there _is_ a song.

“I’m going to get a coffee. You want anything?”

Beca shakes her head.

The clock on the wall is almost deafening as the second hand circles the dial.

_Time,_ she thinks. _I want time._

_Time with her._

Beca stares at the wall as she absorbs the silence. She thinks about Chloe, her brightness and her joy, and how everything that she is, everything she promises to be, everything Beca will promise to be for her, is literally in the hands of a stranger.

A surgeon.

A surgeon who is standing in the doorway and looking right at her.


	4. Weeks

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you so much for all of the comments and kudos so far. 
> 
> I can't believe that I had intended this to be a 5-6k one shot. It's 25k in total (whoops!)
> 
> Anyway, here's the next instalment.

**Part 3- Weeks**

Time never stands still, but it slows.

The sound of each second passing gets further and further away, until there’s room to take a breath between each tick and tock.

Everything else gets further and further away, too. People get smaller and corridors get longer and the lights cast shadows across the floor.

The time between the doctor opening the door and opening his mouth feels like a lifetime.

It’s enough time for Beca to conclude the worst. There’s something in his terrifying, pale eyes that scares her and she decides he can’t possibly look like that and be bringing good news.

She thinks about a life lived without Chloe, the hollow space and the silence she would leave. She thinks about her smile and the colour of her hair and the way she dances around the kitchen when she thinks she’s alone. She thinks about thunderstorms and she thinks about thanksgiving and she thinks about the road trip they wanted to take all the way up the coast, stopping in every town and city they wanted until they got to Seattle. She thinks about how she’d been excited to show Chloe the places she went to when she was growing up. She thinks about all of it, imagining it fading from colour to sepia until everything is grey and it’s impossible to make out the lines.

“Is your friend here?”

“Coffee.” She points. It’s all she’s got.

“I’m here.”

Beca has never been so relieved to see Aubrey. She reaches out and takes her hand. The subtle squeeze she gets is enough to tell her that she’s not entirely alone.

The doctor has a pen in his hand. Beca’s eyes are drawn to the way he holds it and taps it against his thigh as he speaks.

“The surgery went on longer than expected. We were able to remove the cyst in its entirety but some of the tumour is behind the cranial nerve. With the artery already weakened from the pressure of the cyst, it was too high a risk to remove it without causing brain damage. We’ve sent samples for testing. I’ll be in contact soon to discuss next steps with her.”

None of the words go in. Beca blinks when he finishes and looks up into his eyes. “So, she’s okay?”

“She will be. She’s in recovery. You can go and see her, but she won’t be awake yet.”

As they make their way down the corridor, Aubrey lets go of Beca’s hand. Beca hadn’t even realised they were still holding on to one another and it forces her to turn her head. Aubrey’s expression is one of amusement, which feels- to Beca- weirdly misplaced.

“You… you’re looking at me weird, Posen.”

“I’m going to have to tell Chloe that you were staring at the doctor’s crotch the entire time he was talking.”

Beca’s mouth drops open. “I was… what?” She sputters. “Aubrey, I… I wasn’t looking anywhere near his,” she lowers her voice, “crotch.”

“Sure.”

“I was looking at his pen.”

“You… is that what you’re calling it?”

The growl that threatens to come launching out of Beca’s mouth is halted the moment they find the right room and spot Chloe through the glass. She’s on her back, hooked up to too many monitors for Beca to feel calm about the situation. There’s a gauze on the side of her head which it’s clear is spotted with blood. Under it, Beca knows, they’ve shaved away a patch of Chloe’s perfect auburn hair. They’ve cut off her hair and sliced open her head and there’s still a part of a tumour in there and Beca… Beca can’t do this here.

She takes a deep breath, willing herself to stay upright, and counts to ten.

Aubrey opens the door before she gets to eight and, suddenly, they’re in a completely different kind of vacuum. One that somehow contains three people, a plethora of beeping machines and the sterile scent of hospital-grade disinfectant.

Beca sits herself down on one of the chairs by the side of Chloe’s bed and, slowly, lets herself look over her.

The clock on the wall is there purely to taunt her, she thinks.

_Not yet,_ it tells her once again.

She pushes down the panic and tries her best to focus on simply being there for Chloe when she wakes.

_Not yet._

* * *

It takes a certain kind of music nerd to know who Beca Mitchell is.

They’ve been told that Chloe will be coming around from the anaesthetic soon, but she had to pee and she was directed to the corridor and given directions to the nearest bathroom. She has to give her name to get back onto the ward where Chloe is, thankfully, still in bed just as she left her and the nurse gives her a strange look. Beca wouldn’t think much of it, but people seem to be checking on her and Aubrey a whole lot more than they were before. They are offered cushions for their uncomfortable chairs and are given coffee that comes in a mug instead of a paper cup.

It’s weird, being recognised. It feels kind of nice. She begins to wonder what the nurse has said about her that is warranting all of this special treatment.

It’s only when an older nurse, one who doesn’t even look in Beca’s direction, offers them both cookies from the jar they keep hidden in the desk at the nurse’s station before fluffing up Chloe’s pillow and brushing back her hair as she goes over her vitals that it hits her.

It’s got nothing to do with Beca at all.

It’s Chloe. Chloe and her damn super power.

It shouldn’t come as a surprise that Chloe’s magnetism doesn’t even stop working when she’s unconscious. Beca’s starting to suspect she has her own gravitational pull of some kind.

It would explain, for one, why she and Aubrey can’t bring themselves to move.

It would explain why they are both in that room in the first place.

It would explain why even a brain tumour doesn’t want to let go.

Beca doesn’t know whether to laugh or cry when that thought hits her. The indecision contorts her face, like she’s holding in a sneeze.

She hates that it’s in that moment that Chloe opens her eyes.

She’s certain, if she were more cognisant, Chloe would love it.

* * *

Reality hits Beca hard when Chloe wakes up fully. She’s under strict instructions to keep her neck still and she’s drinking water out of a cup she isn’t allowed to hold yet through a long, plastic straw.

The one thought Beca has as she watches her drink is that she hopes there is a place in this hospital to recycle the straw.

Chloe would hate for anything she did to hurt the turtles.

Chloe loves turtles.

Weirdly, it’s that thought that pushes Beca over the edge. She feels her chest shudder as she takes a breath and tries to calm herself.

“Hey, Bec.” Chloe’s voice is still weak, but just the sound of it reverberating in the air is better than any song Beca’s ever heard. A finger reaches out and Chloe gestures to the patch on her head where, underneath layers of gauze and bandage, several staples cover a small plate of metal. “I actually am titanium.”

Aubrey is outside taking a work call she’s been putting off. Beca takes the chance to get up and move closer, the feeling she’s been pushing down beginning to bubble up inside her. Tears are pricking at her eyes as she leans in and smiles. “You’ve always have been titanium to me.” She pauses, watching Chloe’s face for a reaction. “Too corny?”

Chloe’s smile, the creases in the corner of her eyes, is enough to floor Beca. When she looks directly at her and says “just enough”, something catches.

She knows Chloe sees it before she has a chance to compose herself.

She knows because a hand is reaching out to hold her.

“Hey,” Chloe’s voice sounds stronger. Beca knows she’s making an effort to be heard. “Bec, I know I can’t have solid food but the nurse said I could have yogurt and I’m really craving that greek one we had before? With the honey in it? Can you do that for me?” Beca can feel her eyes brimming with tears but she nods along, her mouth pursed together. “Get Bree something sweet, too.” Chloe looks at her sincerely, as if she’s the one who they should be worrying about. Beca know she’s giving her permission. Permission to leave. Permission to feel. Permission to break down somewhere private. “Take your time.”

Time, Beca thinks as she rushes out of the ward and into the nearest elevator, is the whole problem.Every second, minute, hour that passes by is a reminder that there is only a finite amount of sand in the hourglass. For a moment, for several moments, she had had to let herself think about what would happen if Chloe’s time had run out.

Every feeling Beca had pushed down is rising, now. It rises up and her cheekbones ache with the sheer volume of emotion as her mouth opens in a gasp. The tears fall, hot and rapid. Her heart hammers in her chest. By the time Beca reaches the ground floor, she’s holding on by a thread. She finds the nearest bathroom, walks in and locks the door.

She’s grateful that people crying in a hospital don’t get asked questions. Or, she would be. She’s past caring.

As she lets her body slump forward, Beca’s hands cup her temples. She folds herself almost in half as the events, every terrifying minute, of the last few weeks flashes before her. It hits her, then, how much it hurts to have been this close to losing Chloe.

How much it hurts to have come so close to losing her without saying anything.

How much more it would have hurt if she had lost her.

Beca knows she would never have forgiven herself.

She would never have let herself forget.

The idea, the thought, would have haunted her forever.

Beca dries her eyes quickly and splashes some water on her face. One glance in the mirror tells her it has made no difference whatsoever, but she’s only heading to the grocery store closest to the hospital and she’s sure she’s not the first or last crying woman to have entered there that day.

Maybe, she thinks, she could buy a pack of tampons alongside her yogurt and the chocolate-covered pretzels she knows Aubrey loves. Maybe that would give an explanation. 

Or, she realises as she walks through the automatic doors, maybe the fact that she’s been secretly in love with her best friend for far too long and said best friend has a tumour in her brain and has just come out of surgery and could have died and she _still_ hasn’t found the courage to just come out and say how she feels might be enough to explain why she looks crazy and emotional right now.

Beca hopes so, because thinking about it is making her cry again and she isn’t sure she knows how to stop now she’s started.

This, she thinks as she wipes at her eyes with her sleeve, is why she has never _done_ emotions.

It’s too much like hard work.

* * *

It turns out that Beca’s minor (or major, shut up) breakdown in the hospital and the grocery store and the elevator is like a cresting wave. Once it’s risen to the top, it crashes over.

Beca isn’t sure she even cried this much when she was a baby.

On the whole, she keeps it to herself. She cries in the shower before she goes with Aubrey to pick up Chloe from the hospital the day she gets discharged. She quietly sniffles and wipes her eyes in the bathroom before they leave. She sits in the front of the taxi so that the girls can’t see the tears that may or may not escape on the way home.

She tries her best to deny the fact that she leaves a wet patch on Aubrey’s shoulder when they finally have to say goodbye.

“Emotions?” Chloe teases her as she wipes at her eyes when Beca walks into her room once Aubrey’s taxi has gone. She taps the space on the bed next to her and holds out her arm. Beca sits down and snuggles in close without saying a word. Chloe reaches out and strokes over her hair. “Remind me, which one of us had brain surgery?”

“Quiet.”

Chloe simply pulls Beca in closer. Beca indulges herself, lets herself relax into Chloe’s embrace. It’s calm and they’ve got space for the first time in over a week. Without Aubrey there, they could spread out more than they have been able to. Beca kind of loves that instead, the moment they are alone, they come back together.

It tells her something, she thinks.

Or, rather, it reassures her.

“I missed this.”

Chloe’s whisper makes Beca’s skin tingle.

“Me too.”

She’s sick of hiding. She doesn’t need to with Chloe. She couldn’t even if she wanted to.

“What would I do without you, Bec?” Chloe speaks softly as she takes Beca’s hand in hers. “You’re so good to me. You… I’m so lucky.”

“I’m the lucky one.” The words are out of Beca’s mouth before she can stop it. Still, she decides, she’s beyond fighting. She’s beyond caring. “You’re so special to me, Chloe.”

“You too.”

As they sit in relative quiet, Beca’s mind drifts back to the last week. She thinks about surgeons and blood and staples and scans. She thinks about just how fortunate she is that Chloe is sat with her, now, just as she was. She’s the same person. She can count and she knows what day it is (Beca checks every morning) and she can name every member of any late 90s boyband (that was Aubrey’s choice of test. She didn’t think the date was challenging enough for someone working on a doctoral level degree). After everything, Beca still has Chloe. She still has _her_ Chloe.

She has what she wanted.

She has _time._

“Chloe, I…”

“Do you ever think about regrets?”

Beca blinks. _Yes,_ she thinks, _I regret not finishing my sentence._ “I do” she says instead.

“Do you ever, like, think about what would happen if you got to the end of your life and you hadn’t done the things you thought you would?”

Beca swallows and lets herself nod. Part of her wonders whether, after everything, Chloe might just be the one to say it out loud first.

It wouldn’t surprise her. She’s always been braver.

“That’s what I was thinking about, you know, that night you came into my room. Before… before.” Beca nods. “I was thinking about all the things I wanted to do and all the things I wish I’d said and done and… I made a list. It’s not a bucket list, not really, but it’s the things I wished I could have…”

Beca hadn’t realised, before, that Chloe was nervous. Now, her eyes hone in on the way her fingers tremble slightly as she unlocks her phone. She can see the way Chloe can’t quite may eye contact and the way her cheeks are flushed.

Part of her wants to just lean in and kiss her.

She almost finds enough courage to move. 

Then Chloe speaks.

“I wish I’d admitted that, when I was six, it was me who let Bugs Bunny out of the cage, not Jason. He got grounded for a week and missed his best friend’s birthday party. I wish I’d told my grandpa how much it meant to me that he spent his time teaching me how to play piano. I wish I’d never listened to Alice when she said my breath smelled of eggs and I wish I’d never believed a word Bumper Allen ever said.”

Beca leans in closer, but Chloe tilts her phone away so she can’t see the screen.

“I wish I’d taken that road trip with Aubrey that we’d always wanted to do when we still lived in Georgia. There is still nothing better than a Florida sunset and I wish I’d seen at least one with her. I wish I’d had the courage to stand up to her, too. Although sometimes I wonder if that was just how things were meant to be.”

It’s subconscious, the way Beca’s hand moves in Chloe’s so she can hold it firmly and squeeze. The way it feels so natural would, if Beca thought about it, make her heart skip a beat. She isn’t thinking, though. She can’t focus on anything but the sound of Chloe’s voice.

“I wish I’d asked Beca to sing more. I wish I knew if there was a reason why she doesn’t do it as much. I miss the sound of her voice and I’d give anything to hear it every day.” Chloe pauses, then, and Beca’s breath hitches in her throat. “I wish I’d told her more how proud I am of the person she’s become. I want to be there when she hears her own voice on the radio and when her album is released and when it gets nominated for more awards than any other record in history and wins all of them. I…” If Beca wasn’t crying before, the sound of Chloe’s wavering voice is enough to set her off.

“I want to find a way to tell her how much she matters. I want to find a way to explain just how important and how special she is and how each and every moment I have spent in her company, ever since that first time I saw her at Barden, has meant something.”

She squeezes Chloe’s hand again. She hopes it says enough.

“If I only have this time left, I’d ask one thing.” Beca can feel Chloe’s eyes on her. Slowly, she looks up to meet sapphire blue. “I’d ask her to sing whatever the song is that she hears when she thinks of me. I’d like to know what it sounds like.”

There is a song in Beca’s heart, there always has been. It’s Chloe’s song. The problem Beca has is that the song in her heart doesn’t have a melody. It doesn’t have words. It’s simply a feeling.

_Sing the song you hear when you think of her._

There isn’t a single song in her head, either. There are too many, all bundled together into a mix so complicated Beca couldn’t recreate it on her laptop, let alone with her mouth. Instead, she takes a breath and closes her eyes. She thinks of Chloe and feels her hand, her fingers tangled up between hers, and lets herself sing.

_God only knows what I’d be without you._

When she opens her eyes again, Chloe is looking at her. She’s trying her best to smile, Beca knows she is, but there’s something else.

She’s seen it before.

Fear.

“If… if it’s…”Neither of them want to say the word but Beca nods her head. “You’ll be there, right? Whatever happens?”

Beca leans in close and taps her hand over Chloe’s chest.“I’ll be here” she whispers.Taking Chloe’s hand in hers, she moves it over her own heart. “And you’ll be here.”

Chloe’s hand stays where it is as she falls asleep.

Beca holds it steady and listens as the clock counts each moment that passes.

* * *

“Dr Thurston has asked to see me tomorrow.”

Beca doesn’t quite process the words she’s hearing at first. She’s been jumping out of her skin and battling a brief wave of anxiety every single time Chloe’s phone has lit up over the past week. When the news finally came, she had expected it would be in a more dramatic fashion.

“Oh” is all she manages to say for a moment. Suddenly, it hits her and she is opening her laptop. “Alright, what time? I can get out of the meeting in the morning but I might have to ask Frankie to put Pharrell in the other studio in the afternoon so I…”

Chloe looks like she’s about to cry. Beca’s up out of her seat before she even knows what she’s doing. “Hey,” she crouches in front of her best friend and looks up at her, “did… did he say anything else?” Chloe shakes her head. “Are you… do you think…” Beca isn’t as good at reading emotions as Chloe is. It isn’t the first time she’s wondered how different things would be if their situations were reversed. “Talk to me, baby. Tell me what you need.”

“I hate this.”

Beca nods sympathetically. “I know.”

“No,” Chloe’s voice is slightly louder, “I mean, I hate that you have to change things to make room for me. I… I hate that I’m doing this to you and your life. You’re young. You’re supposed to be _flying_. You’re not supposed to be sacrificing any of what you’ve spent your life building for someone like me.”

Beca pulls her chair around so she’s sat in front of Chloe. Her hands land on her knees. “Someone like you? Chloe, I’d do anything for you. I mean it. Anything.”

“I know,” Chloe’s sigh is heavy as she wipes at her eyes, “but that’s not the point. The point is that you shouldn’t _have_ to. It’s not fair.”

“I know, sweetie, but life’s not fair sometimes.”

Beca knows it sounds condescending the moment she says it. She should have known it would incense Chloe. “Yes, I am fully aware of that.” Sarcasm, in the hands of Chloe Beale, is a dangerous thing. It hurts. There’s an intensity behind her eyes as she rises from her seat.

“Chlo. Please.” Beca begs. She doesn’t know what she’s pleading for exactly, other than it’s anything but this. Anything but Chloe edging further and further away from her, shifting closer and closer towards the door.

“Leave me alone, Beca.” There’s a hand, a trembling hand, held up in front of her before she can step any nearer. “I need to think. I… I…” Chloe brushes at auburn hair. “I can’t think with you there. You’re too in my head.”

The words resonate with Beca more than Chloe could possibly know. “Well, I can think with you around either” she bites back, feeling herself growing frustrated. “You’re all I can think about.”

She didn’t expect that confession would ever come out coloured with anger.

Chloe glares at her. “Well, I’m sorry for being such an inconvenience.” Her hand is on the door handle before Beca can reach it.

“Wait, that’s not what I…” she tries to pull her back in with words, but it’s too late. The door is open and the cold breeze slams it shut the moment Chloe steps through it.

Beca drops to the floor and stares at the ceiling.

“Fuck.”


	5. Days

**Part 4- Days**

The clock on the kitchen wall marks each second that Chloe is out of the house.

Beca hears every single one of them.

She loses count, but she knows it’s been a long time.

In the dark of her bedroom, she holds herself and stares at the wall. She knows she could have, maybe should have, followed Chloe. She knows she should be out there, scouting the streets of their neighbourhood just in case she’s wandering around with a bottle of beer wrapped in brown paper. She knows LA is dangerous and she knows people make stupid decisions when their emotions are running high, but she also knows Chloe.

She trusts her.

She just needs time.

Beca isn’t sure whether it’s night or morning when she hears keys in the door and the sounds of two shoes being kicked off and landing on the wooden floor downstairs. She isn’t sure what time it is but she knows it’s late.

She fights the urge to check and simply rolls onto her back. She breathes in deeply and shuts her eyes, listening as Chloe makes her way to her own bedroom. When her door closes, Beca is finally able to sleep.

In the morning, nobody speaks. Instead, they do a silent kind of dance around one another, pouring coffee and making toast and glaring at their phones.

There is a look, a glance Chloe shoots in Beca’s direction, when an alarm goes off on her phone and she grabs her car keys. There is an expectant stare once they both have their shoes on. Beca simply waits by the open door until Chloe gets the hint that she is there to drive her to her appointment.

Still, nobody speaks.

The silence follows them to the hospital, into the parking lot and through the double doors. It follows them down sanitised corridors until they reach the office of Dr Thurston.

“Chloe Beale?”

Beca opens her mouth to ask, to check whether Chloe wants her there, but she doesn’t need to. Not when Chloe is standing in front of her holding out her hand.

It’s not much, but it’s enough of a peace offering for now.

As they settle into the seats across from the doctor at his desk, Beca notices that Chloe doesn’t let go.

She squeezes. She hopes it says something.

“So,” Chloe’s hand clenches as the doctor speaks, “we have the results of your biopsy. The tumour is benign.” Beca can feel tears of relief pricking at the backs of her eyes. “However.”

She swallows harshly. Her head feels like she’s got whiplash.

“However, I am concerned that there is a lesion, a cluster of cells still in your brain that we couldn’t remove during the surgery. My main concern is that, if we leave it in there, the tumour will simply grow again. It might grow quicker, or at the same pace, but you’ll be back here at some point in the future and- unfortunately- the biopsy results may not go in your favour a second time.”

“So what happens now?”

It’s the first time Beca has heard Chloe’s voice in hours. Hearing it makes her feel strangely euphoric, even if the words aren’t directed at her.

“I’m recommending radiotherapy. We have a procedure we can offer you here and I can get you in as soon as possible. It’s only a one-time procedure, it takes about 90 minutes. We take a metal cage and place it over the site on your head. The radiation targets the area of the brain where the cells are sitting and hopefully that’s all it’ll take to get you good and healthy again.”

“And what are the risks?”

Beca begins to feel like she should be taking notes. Instead, she holds onto Chloe’s hand and doesn’t let go.

“Nausea, sickness, fatigue. Most people are out of action for a few days, no more. Sometimes symptoms worsen for a while due to swelling, but the headaches soon disappear.” Chloe nods along. Beca wonders how she can still look like she’s half-smiling even through all of this. “It’s just a case of being careful afterwards to give yourself time to heal. I have a few websites I can direct you to if you’d like to do some more research, but I’d encourage you to make a decision sooner rather than later. Let’s not forget, benign or not, we are still talking about a brain tumour here. The smaller it is, the less risk there is of damage to other parts of the brain. If you let it grow and we do the same kind of procedure, there’s a much higher chance you’d end up losing cognitive function as a result.”

Beca doesn’t really know what Chloe has to think about, but she doesn’t ask why she doesn’t answer. Instead, once they are shown out of the room, she fishes her car keys out of her bag and lets Chloe lead her back down to where they parked.

As distant as they feel in their silence, Beca can feel Chloe’s hand in hers.

For now, it’s enough.

It’s enough until its not.

Until night falls and Chloe still hasn’t said anything and Beca can’t deal with it anymore.

She retreats, unable to bear the weight of the silence that comes when they are in the same space, and clambers into bed. The tears come without much warning, but Beca can do nothing but roll onto her side and let them trickle over her face and drip off her nose. She doesn’t want Chloe to see her like this. She can’t help but worry that she’ll get the wrong idea and think that it’s because of the surgery (which it is) and that she can’t deal with it (which is also kind of true). She also doesn’t want Chloe to see her like this because she’s supposed to be the strong one and all Chloe will want to do is take care of her.

It’s all the wrong way around.

Like so many other things.

When the door to her bedroom opens, letting in a shaft of light, Beca quickly wipes at her face. Chloe walks in and stands in the middle of the room, hands clasped in front of her.

“So, uh, there’s a centre for cancer treatment in Portland that can get me in at the start of the month.” Beca counts the days and works out it’s only two weeks away before she realises that Chloe’s talking about Oregon. “It isn’t exactly the same procedure and I’ll need more than one round but it’s cheaper and I… I could stay with mom and dad. I can go there and get the treatment and you can stay here and work and… and…”

Chloe’s voice doesn’t carry much conviction, as hard as she tries. Beca pulls herself up, brushing her hair back off her face.

“Why?”

It’s the only thing she can think to ask. Beca watches as Chloe takes it in. It’s the first word she’s said to her in two days. It’s the first word she’s said out loud.

“You’ve got better things to do than look after me.”

“But what if you…” the words get stuck in Beca’s throat. “Why are you so scared to need me?” She pauses, spotting how Chloe’s teeth scrape over her bottom lip. “I…. I get it, I do. I’ve always been scared to lean on people but you? You’re a people person. You…” It’s an argument she isn’t sure how to finish. Beca takes a breath and lets herself think for a moment. She thinks about Chloe’s words and her actions and her running away. She seems to think of it as a mercy abandonment, like she’s doing Beca a favour by refusing to lean on her.

She doesn’t realise that Beca likes the pressure; that Beca likes knowing she’s there.

“I thought it would be selfish to say this, but I don’t think you… I don’t think you see it.” Beca waits for Chloe to look at her before she continues. “You don’t see that I need you too. That I’m not doing any of this because I have to. I’m making a choice, Chloe, because you’re the most important person in my life. I’m making a choice to put you above everything else because that’s where you deserve to be. Because you matter, Chloe.” Chloe nods her head. Beca lets herself smile. “In sickness or in health, right?”

“We’re not married, Bec.”

Beca shrugs. “Eh, it’s as close as I’m going to get.” She holds out her hand, hoping that Chloe will step closer and take it. When she does, Beca whispers. “I need you and you need me. It’s just the way things are, alright?” Her other hand is pulling back the bed sheets and patting down a pillow before she really knows what she’s doing.

“Stay?”

When Chloe nods, Beca feels something within her click back into place.

“Stay with me.”

The words are barely spoken, but Chloe smiles and Beca knows she’s heard them.

“Don’t leave me.”

Nobody speaks, but Chloe’s arm lands around her. Beca feels the pressure, knows she’s there, and it says everything she needs to know.

* * *

Radiotherapy, it turns out, is just as terrifying as it had been in Beca’s nightmares (except that, in reality, there is a sterile hospital bed and a metal head-shaped cage and several people in white lab coats speaking a scientific language she doesn’t understand. In her dreams, they were at the Grand Canyon and- for some reason- Freddie Mercury was there and Beca was forced to endure increasingly disturbing challenges while Chloe’s body was held perilously over the cliff edge.) Still, it’s terrifying and medical and Chloe might just be the bravest person she’s ever met.

Beca tells her as much on the drive home. She tells her quietly, though, because Chloe is pale and she’s wearing sunglasses and Beca knows her head must be hurting so badly right now that she isn’t sure why she isn’t screaming in agony.

Probably because of the noise, she reasons.

When they get home, Chloe takes herself to the couch and gets comfortable. Once she’s settled, she looks over at Beca and taps her chest.

Beca does it back, just as she had done in the hospital.

She isn’t entirely sure what it means at this point, but it means something and that’s enough.

Chloe closes her eyes and Beca retrieves her laptop and her headphones. Even though they’re the fancy kind that don’t release a tinny sound into the world around them, Beca turns the volume down low just in case. She keeps things quiet and works on the parts of two tracks she knows she can edit from home. It’s the only work she has right now. Everyone at her label loves Chloe. They have made no secret of the fact that they love Chloe way more than they love her, and she’s always smiled and nodded and tried not to blush when she thinks about just how right they are to adore her. Her inbox has been conspicuously quiet ever since Chloe came out of surgery and, suddenly, there’s an intern who has access to the ‘demos’ file and, she suspects, the pile of CDs (seriously, who still uses them?) and USBs (Beca’s still guilty of that one) on her desk in the office she hasn’t visited for weeks now.

She can’t say she’s missing it too much.

Nobody gets into music production for the admin.

She’s just finalising a much better version of the key change in one of the songs she’s been putting off when Chloe stirs. Her headphones are slipped off quickly and she shoots her a gentle smile across the living room.

“Hey there” she says quietly, “how’s the head?”

Chloe is pale. It’s kind of a running theme these days. She’s pale and gaunt and looks as ill as she probably feels, but yet she smiles.

  
“Fine.”

Beca tilts her head. “You know I love how you say these things to make me feel better, but be honest please?”

“Feel like shit.”

Beca nods. “That’s better. What can I do? Do you want to try and eat something? You should at least have some water.” She grabs Chloe’s bottle off the table and hands it to her, watching as she takes a slow sip. “Do you want to go up to bed?”

“Yeah. Think so.”

While Chloe pushes the blanket back down onto the edge of the couch and begins to pull herself up, Beca puts her laptop away and checks the door is locked. She grabs Chloe’s bag, which she knows is full of painkillers from the hospital, and watches as her favourite redhead, her favourite person, struggles to her feet.

It’s a longer walk up to the second floor than it has ever been before, but Beca holds Chloe upright and helps her with every single step. When they reach the landing, she pushes Chloe’s door open and leads her in.

“I’ll get clean jammies for you. Do you want to use the bathroom?”

Chloe licks her dry lips carefully. “Yeah.”

“Cool. I’ll go get changed. I’ll be back, though. And, ah, call me if you need me.”

Once Chloe is in the bathroom, Beca changes her own clothes and throws her jeans so that they land somewhere close to the laundry hamper. She walks back across the hall to Chloe’s room and picks out her favourite matching set of pyjamas, a set Emily had picked out for her one Christmas with little cartoon puppies on them. They’re soft and comfortable and Beca decides that having buttons down the front which avoid the need to pull anything over her head is probably a good thing.

She’s sitting upright on the right- her side- of Chloe’s bed when the bathroom door opens.

Chloe sits down on the edge of the mattress and grabs the pyjama top but holds it in her hand for a moment before she moves to lift up her t-shirt. At the first wince, Beca is by her side.

“Sorry. I… help, please.”

Deep blue eyes are pleading with her and Beca can see that Chloe’s in pain. Slowly, she pulls the garment up and helps two weak arms through the holes. She lifts the t-shirt until it’s around Chloe’s neck and stretches the gap as wide as she can with her hands before gently, ever so gently, lifting it over where there is a patch of gauze taped to the side of her head, revealing the bald edges of Chloe’s scalp.

“Bra?”

“Off.”

Beca reaches around and unclasps Chloe’s bra. It isn’t the first time she’s seen her best friend in this state of undress. She can’t even count at this point how many times she’s seen Chloe in less. Still, she tries her best to be respectful, to look away as she pulls the straps off her shoulders and lifts the cups away from her chest.

Her hands are trembling slightly as she helps Chloe shrug on her clean top and begins to button it up. Somehow, she thinks, dressing Chloe feels more intimate than undressing her. It’s a different kind of trust. A more intense kind of love; the kind that never goes away.

When she’s done, she glances to the shorts folded on the bed.

“Can you pull…”

“I’ll try.”

There is no discussion about whether Beca sleeps in Chloe’s bed with her.

It’s a given.

Once Chloe is comfortable, Beca manoeuvres herself so that she’s sure she’s not going to nudge or disturb her in the night. It’s a weird position and she’s going to be aching, but she knows she’ll still be in less pain than Chloe.

“You should take something for your head before you try and sleep.”

The number of pills Chloe has at her disposal would be worrying under different circumstances. It would be even more worrying if Beca didn’t know that she didn’t already have access to tranquillisers strong enough to knock out a fully-grown horse.

“Dr Thurston gave you the good stuff.”

Chloe eyes the packages and picks up the one she had been directed to take at night. She presses out two, small pills and swallows them quickly with a swig of water. As she settles down onto her pillow, trying not to move her head too much, Beca moves to turn out the light.

She isn’t expecting Chloe to speak.

She certainly expecting her to say what she says.

“Bec, do you have, like, a _thing_ for Dr Thurston?”

It takes every ounce of composure not to shriek. Instead, Beca turns to her best friend and glares.

“What? Why?”

Chloe is smiling and there’s a glimpse of her impish charm in her eyes. Beca feels a bubbling in her belly at the sight. It’s a reminder, she knows, of exactly why she loves Chloe Beale. Of exactly why this woman has made her the person she is.

It’s all in her eyes.

“Well, you were weird with him before and I distinctly remember Aubrey telling me you were staring at his crotch.” Chloe’s words come out slowly, as if she’s choosing each and every one deliberately. “Do you have a crush on him? Is he your McSteamy?”

Beca rolls her eyes. She kind of hates that she knows who that is.

“No. He has scary eyes. He looks like a White Walker.” She sighs and lowers herself down onto her pillow. “I mean, I like him a little more since he, you know, saved your brain or whatever, but no. Absolutely not.”

It’s quiet for a moment. Beca begins to wonder if Chloe’s asleep, but then she begins to speak once more. “Yeah, he’s not your type. He would probably try to take you to some fancy restaurant on a date. He seems that kind of guy. Food snob, the kind of guy who shows off by ordering for you and leaving a big tip.”

“Hey, there will be no talk of big tips in this bed thank you.”

Chloe groans. “Don’t make me laugh, Bec.”

“Sorry.”

A hand finds hers across the sheets and Beca feels fingers lacing between hers. “You know,” Chloe speaks more softly than before, “I think I’d like that kind of a date. Not with a doctor, though. My mom told me never to date a doctor. But with… someone nice. And we could go somewhere on the water where we can eat vegetables I’ve never heard of and where every course is tiny but comes on a huge white plate. And we’ll drink a different wine with every course and listen to the piano person who plays the piano…” Chloe’s eyes flutter to a close before she finishes her sentence. “… kiss me on the deck… slow dancing… nice.”

“Yeah, sounds nice” Beca whispers, smiling to herself. “Sweet dreams, Chloe.”

* * *

Chloe’s dreams are not sweet.

She doesn’t have any.

Neither does Beca.

Less than two hours later, Beca is holding a bowl under Chloe’s chin as she throws up for the third time. She’s weak, incredibly so, with strands of her hair sticking to her pale, sweat-coated forehead. Her teeth chatter and she gasps for breath and Beca doesn’t think she’s ever felt so helpless in her whole life.

The doctor had warned them about the nausea. He had explained about the pain.

Beca hadn’t quite anticipated just how bad it would be.

“I’m here, baby” she says gently as Chloe whimpers. She lifts the corner of one of the many towels she has used and wipes it across her mouth. “You good? Do you want to try and have some water?”

Chloe accepts the proffered bottle and waits as Beca helps her to lift the straw to her lips.

  
  
“Slowly, baby.” Beca isn’t entirely sure at what point she started using the pet name, but it’s sticking. “Alright, let me clean everything up. There’s another bowl beside you but if you don’t have the energy, just aim for the towels.”

Chloe doesn’t have the energy to smile. She simply blinks. When Beca takes the bowl away from her body, she lifts her hand to tap at her chest.

Beca does it back and it fills her with warmth.

Dr Thurston had said two days. Two days of nausea and Chloe would start to feel better.

Beca calls him on day four, when Chloe has finally fallen asleep propped up in bed after taking yet another cocktail of medications. He doesn’t sound concerned, but then he probably has a completely different understanding of all of this since he sees it all the time but doesn’t have to live it. All he tells her is to keep her warm and hydrated and to call for an ambulance if she can’t keep water down.

“She’s recovering. It’s just… taking its toll.”

_Yeah, no shit,_ Beca thinks.

She makes a note of everything Chloe does. Every time she drinks, or tries to eat. Every time she sleeps and how long she sleeps for. She notes when she throws up and when she complains of pain, logs the medication she takes and how often she changes the dressing on her head.

It becomes a process in their vacuum. They go through the motions and both of them are too exhausted to think about anything else.

Well, that’s what Beca thought, at least.

It happens when she helps Chloe take a bath.

Beca had walked her through to the bathroom, supporting her weak legs every time she stumbled. She had made Bambi jokes and commented about buying her a helmet as she had helped her peel off her pyjamas and step into the warm water, lowering into it until it pooled at her chest.

Chloe is skin and bone and not much else. She’s impossibly pale and Beca can see every mark on her body, every indentation from the pillows she’s been propped up against, as she rinses her back. While her eyes are not on her, Chloe finds the strength to speak.

“Bec, I need to ask you something.”

Beca helps her lean back and begins washing her arms as she listens.

“It’s important.”

She stops, putting down the sponge she had been using and sitting back on her knees on the tiled floor.

“I don't feel like I'm getting better and... and.... I keep thinking that, if anything happens,” Beca opens her mouth to interject, to say something- anything- to avoid dealing with what she knows is coming, but Chloe’s pleading eyes find hers and she stops. “I’ve always hated people being uncomfortable. I… I don’t want people in suits or dresses. I want people to wear whatever they want. Even sweatpants.” She pauses, looking intently at Beca in a way that makes her breath hitch. “You’re the only person I trust with the music. The only thing I ask is that the last thing I hear before… I want it to be your song. The song you hear when you think about me.”

Beca feels as if she’s got a ball stuck in her throat. She nods and tries to hold back the incoming onslaught of hot, desperate tears.

“I don’t want to be buried.”

Another nod. Beca knows from the way Chloe looks at her that she understands how hard she’s trying to listen and take everything in.

“I want my ashes to be interred at Barden. I… mom would say Florida and dad would say Oregon and you would say here but… Barden is home.”

“I get you.”

Once Chloe is up and out of the bath, wrapped in a warm towel, Beca sits down on the toilet lid and pulls her close. Wordlessly, she lifts her best friend up onto her lap and cradles her. Chloe leans in and Beca rests her nose against her hair. For a moment, they sit.

“I’ve never felt so sick in my whole life. I… I don’t know how much longer I can do this.”

The confession lands hard and heavy in Beca’s head. She wants to argue against it, wants to be logical and rational, but Chloe’s fears are her fears and every day they become more and more real.

She looks down at Chloe, indulging in the way she can almost drown in ocean blue eyes.

The first thing Beca notices is that she can’t hear the clock.

The second is how hard Chloe is clutching at her.

“I don’t want to leave you, Bec” the whisper comes out weakly.

Beca sighs and takes in Chloe’s words. Both of them, she knows, are crying now. She takes Chloe’s hand in hers and taps it twice over her chest.

“Impossible. You can’t leave me. Not when there’s a part of you that lives in here.”

When Chloe rests her head there and sobs, gulping and shaking, into Beca’s still-clothed chest, she feels just how much her heartbeat sounds like ‘Chloe’.

She wonders if, with her ear pressed against her, Chloe can hear it, too.

“I love you.”

“I love you too.”

* * *

She isn’t sure if it’s an energy shift, or simply the sound of the clock incessantly reminding her, but Beca feels as if something is changing.

It feels imminent.

She knows automatically what it is.

She doesn’t have time to second-guess, not anymore.

The sense of pressure, the idea of the walls closing in, only serve as yet another push for her to tell Chloe how she feels. To tell her before it’s too late. Chloe’s own words, her own confession, hang over both of them, serving as a stark reminder that none of this is close to what it was meant to be.

Her hand is shaking as she pushes open the bathroom door and steps into Chloe’s room. She can feel the bubbling of anticipation in her belly as she pulls back freshly-laundered sheets and slips herself into the bed. She wonders whether Chloe feels it, too. She looks different, somehow, like she knows. She’s looking at her intensely, eyes roaming over her face and a shy smile on her lips. It’s like she’s waiting for something to happen.

For everything to change.

Beca, running on less sleep than ever before, has nowhere left to hide.

She knows time has never been on her side, that every grain of sand that falls through the hourglass is a moment wasted if she doesn’t tell Chloe exactly how she feels. It would kill her if Chloe never heard what she needs to say. So, she says it.

“Look, I… I know that this maybe isn’t the right time but if this has taught me anything it’s that the right time doesn’t exist.” Her heart is thundering. The clock downstairs seems to match it, beat for beat, even as it gets quicker. It’s a reminder, she supposes, that time can feel as if it slows or speeds up. But it never stops. There is less of it every day.

“I just… I need to tell you Chlo. I need to explain how I feel while I’ve got the chance. I… I love you so much. Like, not just as a friend. I want… I want _more_ than that with you. I think I always have.” She pauses for breath. “You’re everything to me. You’ve made me who I am and… I know you always saw the best in me. It… I always knew you were special but, well, it kind of grew. And I guess what I’m trying to say in some back-to-front way is that I’m in love with you, Chloe. Completely in love with you.”

The silence she gets in return fills her with dread.

Blue eyes meet hers, but Beca doesn’t see the tears she’s expecting.

She sees something she’s seen before.

Fear.

“Beca… I…”

As Chloe’s blue eyes roll back in her head and her body convulses, breaths coming short and sharp, Beca feels her heart shatter in her chest.

“Chloe!”

With her phone pressed to her ear, Beca tries to _think,_ tries to push down the panic long enough to make the call she needs to make.

_Pick up the damn phone!_

“Chloe!” Her voice cracks. “Chloe, can you hear me?!”


	6. Hours

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is just a shout out to the people who commented asking if the chapter titles were acting as a countdown...
> 
> Epilogue will be posted tomorrow.

**Part 5- Hours**

Everything that Beca Mitchell is, everything she has become, is because of Chloe.

She has been there for so long and, if Beca thinks about it, she can trace the paths Chloe carved out for her, follow the tracks she left as Chloe pushed her forwards.

It’s a path that starts in the quad of Barden University. She remembers pleading blue eyes; remembers the noticeable absence of the desire to run away that usually accompanied spending any time talking to girls in fitted dresses with perfectly curled hair, especially if they were holding a clip board. Those blue eyes are responsible for so many things that high school Beca would never have anticipated agreeing to. It starts with taking a sip from a communal glass of Boone’s Farm and standing awkwardly at the edges of parties full of music nerds (not her kind of music nerds, the other kind). The path leads her through an album of memories, from supermarket adventures to making cookies, decorating Christmas trees and their first trip to the beach. The line traces out from Georgia to New York, over to France and Spain, to the middle of the Mediterranean Sea and, then, finally, to LA.

It had taken Beca a while to realise that Chloe was special, but she had always known there was something different about her.

She had always known that Chloe made _her_ different.

At a time when nobody else had believed in her, when she hadn’t believed in herself, Chloe was her champion. She saw something in her and she did everything in her power to make her shine. That shine was what everyone else saw when she finally stood, alone, in a backlit amphitheatre in Nice. It was that shine that had got her to exactly where she is. Chloe’s belief is what will push her to where she needs to be.

Chloe Beale let her grow.

Let her flourish.

She singlehandedly pushed through every wall and every barrier and Beca had never resisted, not really. Chloe had always been the one person she had opened up to more than anyone else. Sure, they had hidden secrets at times and they had fought, but they had always made up.

Beca had been scared, at first, about how quickly Chloe had understood her. It seemed instinctive, the way she pushed and pulled and navigated around the bumps in the road as if they weren’t there. Sometimes, Beca was certain, she’d probably been manoeuvred around obstacles she hadn’t even seen for herself.

Chloe had.

Chloe always did.

It amazes Beca to think about how different she is to when she had first met Chloe all those years ago. There’s a brightness to her, now. A confidence in who she is that runs deep. She is more honest and more open and she lets herself _feel_ because she knows she’s got someone to keep her safe when she deals with the consequences.

It’s like an armour, the way Chloe protects her. She has made her stronger than she thought she could be. Strong enough to find her voice and strong enough to use it. Strong enough to believe in herself and strong enough to say ‘yes’ and ‘no’ when it matters most.

Chloe Beale has made her strong enough that she can deal with this. It may just be the biggest gift Beca thinks she’s been given. It may just be the thing that keeps her going. 

She can’t help but wonder what she’s given in return.

Time, she thinks.

Time and love.

She only wishes she could have given her more. More of both.

* * *

When Beca closes her eyes, all she can see is blue flashing lights.

They had lit up the street as the paramedics had carried Chloe on a stretcher out of the front door.

They had been ahead of Beca, lighting the way, as she had followed the ambulance to the hospital.

Now, it’s like she can’t get rid of them.

Every time she closes her eyes, there they are. It’s a reminder of everything she wishes she could forget. It’s a reminder of the sound of monitors and the way the paramedics said Chloe’s name as they shone a torch into her eyes. It’s a reminder of the way her heart sank, slowly, in her chest as they bundled her up and lifted her onto a stretcher.

It’s a reminder of the doors that closed in front of her as doctors and nurses pushed Chloe further and further away down a corridor Beca was forbidden from entering.

She has no idea how long ago that was.

Time doesn’t matter anymore.

Beca has stopped counting.

Instead, she sits in the same room she had been put into when Chloe was in surgery. She sits and stares at the same white walls and hugs her legs into her body.

Chloe will be alright, she thinks.

She’s strong.

She has to be.

She’s young.

She’s got so much to live for.

There are no tears. Beca can’t cry. She doesn’t think she’ll be able to until she knows what’s happening. Until she knows what she’s crying _for._ Instead, she leans her head back and glares at the annoyingly memorable fluorescent light on the ceiling until its glow is imprinted on her eyes.

She stares until it hurts.

She stares until the door opens.

Aubrey Posen appears surrounded by a halo of blue and white light. For a moment, Beca isn’t sure whether she’s real.

She isn’t certain until the blonde reaches out to touch her, until Beca takes her hand and pulls her into a hug so tight she hears Aubrey gasp for breath. “I’m here” Aubrey whispers gently. “Chloe’s parents are on their way.”

All Beca can do is nod. She has never been more grateful for Aubrey Posen than in that moment. She has never been more grateful to not be alone.

“Bec, what happened?”

Beca licks her lips. They are dry and flaking and she knows that Chloe would tell her off for chewing them. She sighs. “She wasn’t recovering properly. She was so sick. I called the doctor and he said to monitor her. We… we were just getting into bed and I… ” Beca takes a breath and skips over the part she isn’t quite ready to talk about. “She had a seizure. A big one. She… she didn’t come round before the ambulance came. She was breathing but it didn’t sound right and her heart rate was all weird. I just kept her still and talked to her but… I don’t know. Nobody has said anything.”

Aubrey can’t make eye contact. Beca knows she’s trying to hold it together and it makes her wonder just how much of a state she looks. “We’ll be able to find out more when Colin and Linda get here.”

Beca thinks about Chloe’s parents, about how she’d pushed for Chloe to stay with her instead of going to Portland. The guilt hits her and a heavy sob falls from her lips before she can stop it.

“Hey.”

Aubrey doesn’t ask why. She doesn’t ask anything. She just reaches out and holds Beca and strokes her hand over her back.

“It isn’t fair.”

Aubrey nods. “I know. That’s all I keep thinking too. None of this should be happening to someone as good as her. Not when there are people out there who hurt children and who steal and who lie. Chloe… she’s a good person. She doesn’t deserve this.”

Beca takes in the words, but they don’t help. All she can picture is their strange silent argument and the fact that, if she had let Chloe go, her parents could have been with her. “No, I mean, it isn’t fair that I kept her to myself. I just… I was being selfish but I had this whole worry about not having enough time and…” Beca’s eyes meet Aubrey’s and she blinks slowly, trying to find the words to explain the rush of anguish flooding her mind. “I just wanted her to stay with me. I… I wanted time with her.”

“I know.”

“I love her so much.”

“I know.”

Beca’s breath comes out in a deep sigh as she runs her hands through her hair. She thinks about Chloe, about her blue eyes and her auburn hair and her white smile. She thinks about her hands and they way they feel when their fingers intertwine. She thinks about how her skin feels under her lips, how her legs feel when they tangle with hers, how her heart feels when they wake up in the same bed.

“I’m in love with her.”

“I know.”

She can’t help but think about the clock. The stupid clock that has counted, mocking her cowardice as another second, minute, hour, day, week, month, year passed by without a word. Without _the_ word. She can’t help but think that she should have known it was counting down to something.

She can’t help but wonder whether it has stopped.

Whether, like her, it is waiting, suspended, to know what happens next before it works out how to start up again.

“I waited too long to tell her.”

“Bec.” Aubrey’s hand wraps around hers. It isn’t Chloe’s, it doesn’t feel the same, but it holds her down and that’s all she needs.

“I… I tried to tell her tonight. I’d got the words out, but I don’t know if she heard me. I saw her eyes and I thought she was there but maybe…” Slowly, Beca turns to face Aubrey. Tears are rolling down her cheeks and she hiccups as she sniffles. “I don’t know if she heard me. I don’t know if she…” Another shaky sigh. “I love her so much and I don’t know if she heard me. I don’t know if…”

Aubrey’s fingers squeeze Beca’s hand. She holds it tight and tries her very best to smile. Her lips quiver when they move, but it’s enough.

“She knows, Beca.”

“How? I… She… She wasn’t…”

Aubrey lifts her hand and taps two fingers over her chest. With sincere eyes, she nods at Beca and tries her best to give a reassuring smile. “The same way you do.”

* * *

Two taps over the heart.

It’s always been enough until now.

It had been enough to be able to remind herself that she carried a part of Chloe with her, that she always would.

It had been enough of a gesture, enough of an ‘I love you’ to hold her until the time was right.

It had been enough to know that Chloe felt something in her heart for Beca, too.

At least, she hopes that’s what she meant.

All Beca wants in that moment is to ask. She wants to ask Chloe what it meant to her. She wants to ask Chloe why she hasn’t dated anyone since they got to LA. She wants ask if she heard her.

She can’t, though, and it hurts more than Beca can bare. Well, almost. She can’t forget the armour; the protective layer Chloe has built for her over time.

That will keep her safe. Chloe will, always, in some way, keep her safe. She will keep her moving forwards and keep her making music and she’ll keep her smiling every time she remembers. Beca knows she can’t untangle herself from Chloe’s legacy and she knows she would never want to; not when the most important person in the world is the one who made her exactly who she is.

A legacy isn’t enough, though.

A legacy won’t be there when the rain gets loud and the thunder claps and the wind rattles the windows.

A legacy can’t sing ‘I Got You, Babe’ through the bathroom door.

A legacy won’t catch spiders and release them humanely, or help her fold the sheets or remember to buy bread.

A legacy isn’t tangible. It can’t hold her, or be held by her. It can’t play with her fingers in front of the TV or plait her hair or kiss her forehead as it hands her a coffee.

It can’t say ‘come to bed’ or ‘you work too hard’ or ‘I’m proud of you’.

A legacy will never be able to say ‘I love you, too’.

It sucks, Beca thinks, because that’s the only thing she wants to hear.

* * *

“You can see her now.”

Okay, she realises as she releases a long breath, maybe there was more than one thing she wanted to hear.

* * *

When Beca finally walks into the hospital room, the amount of wires attached to Chloe makes her feel sick. The beeping machines have doubled in quantity and there are pumps and drips and too much of it looks important. Like it’s keeping her alive.

“Oh, Beca.”

Linda Beale hugs just like her daughter. That’s the first thought Beca has as the older woman wraps her arms around her and holds her close.

“I’m so glad you were with her.” Something within Beca settles. Something she hadn’t realised was breaking. “She’s always been so lucky to have you.”

When Linda moves away and Colin steps into Beca’s space, she can see from his eyes that he’s been crying. Instead of a hug, he simply takes her hands and looks at her. It’s the same deep blue that fills the pools she has been drowning in for ten years. “The doctors said that, if she’d been alone, she wouldn’t… she wouldn’t have made it.” He blinks back tears, or tries to, and Beca waits patiently.

“You saved her life, Beca.” Colin Beale turns slightly and runs a hand over his daughter’s arm. “I mean, if she’d been on her own we… we would never have got here.”

“Have they said what…” It’s Aubrey who asks. Aubrey, always, who needs the facts.

Colin’s lips purse apologetically. “One of the arteries in her brain got damaged in the surgery. It isn’t bleeding, but it’s swollen and it could go at any moment. They think the seizure was like an alarm; some kind of warning that things were starting to go wrong. If she hadn’t had the seizure, they think she probably would have had an aneurysm and I think we all know how badly that could have ended.”

It’s a stark thought. The gravity of it seems to pull Beca down, until she’s sat, head in her heads on one of the uncomfortable chairs against the wall.

“I know.”

After they have all had a moment to catch their breath, they find themselves standing around the edge of Chloe’s bed.

Beca can’t help but wonder exactly how strong her magnetism is because she can’t remember moving. She’s just… there.

Linda is the first to speak. She reaches out to Aubrey and Beca and takes each of their hands in hers before looking at Colin and taking a deep breath to steel herself.

“Girls, Dr Thurston is going to have to operate again. Chloe will be heading down to surgery as soon as possible. We asked the nurses to give us a little time with you, to be able to tell you, before they take her.” Beca can’t help but feel a surge of admiration. Linda Beale is who Chloe gets her strength from. It’s clear as she pushes, matter-of-factly, through the next sentence. “We have been warned that there is a chance Chloe’s brain won’t survive the surgery. Even if… even if she physically survives, she may not ever recover brain function. We’re giving consent on her behalf for them to operate knowing exactly what that means and knowing that she wouldn’t want to give up without a fight, but you need to know what might happen. You need to know that she might not make it.”

When Linda’s eyes meet hers, Beca knows her composure is slipping. “We’ll step outside and give you girls a moment with her. To say what you need to.” Linda and Colin walk towards the door and pause for a moment. Linda is still forcing a half-smile and Beca can see so much of Chloe in how she tries. “We’ll just be outside.”

* * *

Beca has always hated leaving.

She has always hated walking out of the door knowing that she would have no idea if anything had changed until she walked through it again.

Every time she went away for work, Chloe would make an effort to talk to her every day. Although she had never said, it was as if she knew what Beca was worrying about under the surface. Chloe has always that special ability; the gift of insight into the complex, contradictory mind of Beca Mitchell. She would reassure her in the simplest of ways, with silly photos or throwaway comments, that she was there.

That she wasn’t about to change anything.

That Beca could relax.

Right now, that voice, that side of Chloe is what Beca needs.

She needs her phone to light up with a notification from snapchat. She needs to open it to find a slightly off-centre photograph of Chloe brushing her teeth and pouting with the caption ‘missing my bathroom buddy’.

She needs Chloe.

It isn’t just a want.

She needs her.

Just one more time, she needs Chloe to reassure her that, even when she walks through the door, nothing huge is going to change. She needs to know that yes, maybe the mugs will be in a different place and maybe the bookshelf will look like a rainbow and maybe there is a new house plant next to the TV, but that’s as crazy as it’s going to get.

She needs to know the house won’t be empty.

She needs to know that she won’t be left alone.

As she closes her eyes, Beca can’t help but imagine Chloe. She can’t help but imagine what she would say if it was her in this position. She pictures her gentle smile, the way her eyes would seek her out to make sure she was looking when she whispered “it’s going to be alright” close enough so that nobody else could hear.

Beca has always hated leaving, but she hates the idea of being left even more.

She only _looks_ like she’s comfortable on her own.

The truth of the matter is, Beca is useless without her people. The people who let her be herself. The people who understand.

Beca is useless without Chloe.

Now is the worst time to realise just how true that thought is.

* * *

“Bec?”

Beca blinks, and finds Aubrey staring expectantly at her. She realises that Aubrey is crying and that she’s said her piece. She’s waiting for an answer.

“Bec, do you… do you want me to go? Do you want me to give you some time?”

Beca isn’t the one who needs time.

Not now.

She shakes her head. “No. Stay.”

Aubrey nods and reaches out to touch Chloe’s hand. She holds Beca’s firm. “What do you think she’d want you to say?”

Her mind takes her back through hundreds of images, each one just as special as the last. Beca’s mind conjures up the memory of their first meeting, their first duet, their first hug. She thinks about every touch, every hand-hold, every smile across a stage. She thinks about the first time she thought about wanting to kiss Chloe, and the first time she indulged herself enough to let her lips linger on her cheek as she said goodbye before spring break. She thinks about trying to sleep on the rough terrain of a tent with no ground sheet, about trying to sleep without thinking about Chloe wanting to ‘experiment’.

She thinks about the feeling in her chest when she and Chloe would cuddle up on the couch together; the fizzing in the pit of her stomach whenever their gazes met for longer than they ever did with anyone else. She thinks about feeling jealous and desperate and recognising that there was never anything specific about Chloe she longed for; she loved her whole entire being.

It has always just been _Chloe._ It’s all she’s ever wanted. All she thought she’d ever need.

The idea of getting through any of this without her hurts more than Beca can bear.

She has no idea how to live without Chloe.

She has no idea who she is without Chloe.

It’s then that Beca registers what Aubrey has asked. She stands herself up straight and takes a breath. “She… I don’t think she’d want me to say anything. There’s nothing I could say that she doesn’t know. But she, ah, she asked me once about the song I hear when I think of her. She… she told me that if, if anything happened to her, she wanted it to be the last thing she hears.”

_God only knows what I’d be without you._

The words have never felt more fitting.

Beca uses the last ounces of her energy to get herself through it, singing the lyrics quietly as close to Chloe’s ear as she can get, before the door is pushed open and Linda and Colin are giving the nod that they all know means they have to go.

Chloe has to go, wheeled through double doors that nobody knows whether she’ll come back through.

One by one, they lean in and say something quietly to her. When it’s Beca’s turn, she kisses two of her fingers and presses them over Chloe’s heart. Leaning in, she brushes her hair back off her face and tells her she loves her. With a shaky breath, she places a soft kiss on the very edge of Chloe’s lips.

“I love you”, she whispers it again, tapping her chest as she speaks as she watches the gurney disappear down the long, sterile corridor.

For the first time in months, Beca wills time to speed up.


	7. Watching the Sun Set

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And now, the end is near. And so I face the final curtain...
> 
> I just wanted to thank everyone who has read this for your kindness and your patience. It has been an unexpectedly long journey to get to this point and I feel as if I should take a moment to apologise for the anguish and emotional torture I've subjected you to. 
> 
> Anyway, here is the epilogue. 
> 
> Please let me know your thoughts.

**Epilogue- Watching the Sun Set** ****

Los Angeles is at its most pleasant when the sun begins to set; when the dim light of the dusk casts long shadows of the kinds of plants that need nothing more than air to survive. The orange hue seems to round the city’s edges, it softens the sounds and pulls the blinds down, a diminuendo that ends as night falls.

The sunset happens every single day, yet people stop. They watch. They take photographs.

They understand that there is majesty and beauty in the everyday; they see how special the moment is and they pause to appreciate it just as it is.

It brings a kind of calm that nothing else compares to.

Well, nothing else except Chloe Beale.

Beca accepted a long time ago that Chloe is one of the only people who has ever been- will ever be- able to get her to stop. To breathe. To take the time to appreciate the beauty in the small things.

(Chloe would have no idea how many times Beca had stopped to appreciate her beauty. She would never know how many times Beca had ignored the sunset in favour of watching it reflected in Chloe’s eyes.)

It is strange, Beca thinks, to be here. To have chosen this particular spot, this rooftop bar, for this party. It is strange to stand here, drink in hand, and look out across the city. It is strange to be able to see every single place Chloe Beale has touched.

The hospital.

It’s hard to miss it; it’s almost directly in her line of sight.

It has been two years since she last stepped foot in that building. Two years in which she has done more than she had ever expected. Her life has changed in so many ways, all of them to do with Chloe. Two years was the timeframe that had been imposed on her before. Before, within a matter of months, her entire world had shifted. She had been given two years to work on, write and produce her own album.

It had been three months, plus or minus a few days, since she had quietly taken a physical copy of her very first solo record in her hands, knowing it was complete. Knowing what it mean to have finished making something so personal, so life changing.

“Ladies, Gentlemen, human beings who don’t subscribe to the gender binary,” Beca can’t help but give a trademark eye roll as her manager takes to the small stage at the edge of the room. “Thank you so much for joining us tonight. We, of course, are here to celebrate an incredibly special talent who I understand has a surprise for us all.” Eyes roved over the crowd until the found her. Beca didn’t exactly know why she had thought it was a good idea to try the ‘wallflower’ thing at her own album launch party. “Please welcome to the stage Beca Mitchell!”

It still shocks her that people applaud. It shocks her every day that people know who she is. It shocks her even more that they seem to _like_ her.

What surprises her more than anything else is that nobody else seems to be shocked at all.

_“You’re going to be so famous, Bec. The entire world is going to see what you can do with music and they’re going to be bowing down to you.”_

Chloe had been her first true champion. The first person she had ever opened up to about her ambitions to produce music. She had been the first to encourage her to write, the first to encourage her to branch out.

Beca can never forget that, in true Chloe Beale style, she was also the first to truly get her to sing.

It’s a debt she can never repay.

Never.

Still, as she walks onto the stage and her fingers wrap around the microphone, she thinks this might be a good first step.

“Hi”, she hates the sound of her speaking voice through a microphone. “I’m Beca. I… Man, this is weird.” The crowd laughs with her. Instinctively, she looks up. She knows what she’s searching for.

It’s the same thing she’s always looking for.

Blue eyes.

“So, since most of the people here are people who worked on the record or work for the label, I didn’t want to stand up here and sing a song you’ve heard a thousand times. I thought I’d do something a little special. This song is the last song on the album. It’s a really special song to me because it’s a song I wrote for someone I love very much.” Beca can feel herself getting emotional, but she knows she has to sing. She has to get through this.

“As some of you know, two years ago my beautiful Chloe was diagnosed with a brain tumour. There was one night, while she was recovering from her first surgery, where she shared some of her regrets with me. Some of them were silly, like about how she wishes she’d told the truth about how it was her that let the bunny escape when she was six instead of letting her brother get grounded for it.” She pauses for breath and there’s a smattering of laughter in the crowd. It’s enough. “Some of them were more serious. And, well, one of them was about me.”

The memory of Chloe’s words is ingrained in Beca’s mind.

She hears every single one of them in her voice.

“She said that she wished she could hear the song I heard when I thought about her. But I didn’t really have an answer. I… I felt like there were thousands of songs I could sing about her, but I hadn’t quite worked out what the song in my heart sounded like. Instead, I sang the first song I could think of, which was ‘God Only Knows’ by The Beach Boys. And, ah, man. I sang the same song to her a few weeks later as she lay down on a hospital bed surrounded by machines because she’d told me that she wanted that song- my song- to be the last thing she heard if anything were to happen to her.”

Beca’s hands shake by her sides. She blows out a long breath and closes her eyes.

  
“Well, like I said, it wasn’t the song. That song was someone else’s. Someone else’s melody and their words. It was… it was close, but it wasn’t Chloe.” She opens her eyes, looking almost directly into the spotlight shining on her. “I finally did it, though. I took the time, all the time I needed, and I thought about her and I felt every feeling in my body and I did it. I wrote the song.” She nods and the small band begin the long introduction. “So, here it is. This is ‘You in Music’. For Chloe.”

In the moment before she sings, Beca takes two fingers and taps them against her chest.

She does it before every performance.

She will never, ever stop.

Not when she knows there’s a part of Chloe in her heart.

She’s a part of the band in there, she reasons.

She keeps the beat going.

She keeps time.

* * *

The song takes Beca right back to the hospital. To that room.

She can see herself, almost. She can see herself with Chloe’s hand in hears. She can see herself whispering to her and singing to her and pressing a tentative kiss to the side of her mouth just before the nurses took her away.

The song is enough to pull every emotion from Beca. She knows this is the only time she will ever perform it live. It is too much, she thinks, to be dragged back to that place. That dark, sad, sometimes lonely place where seconds passed by loudly, each one harder than the last.

One thing had got Beca through the next minute. She had lived the cycle endlessly, but the love she had for Chloe had always been, would always be, enough. Slowly, minutes became hours became days became weeks became months became years.

Two years, to be exact.

When the song ends, Beca leaves the stage and walks back to the edge of the room, to the window where she can see the hospital, now lit up in the night. She wonders whether she can still remember which room they were in. Which floor. Which ward.

It doesn’t matter.

  
Not now.

* * *

Beca can see someone walking towards her in the window’s reflection.

For a moment, she stops and smiles. She stops and watches as a hand lifts and two fingers tap against a chest.

It is instinct for her to do the same. 

Slowly, the form moves closer. Beca doesn’t draw her eyes away from the reflection. All she can see, all she ever wants to see, are two blue eyes.

“For you.” A glass of Champagne is pressed into her hand. Beca takes it and turns. Her stomach fizzes as she looks up and lets herself fall into the pools she finds.

Two pools of azure blue.

“Dr Beale”, it still feels strange to say, “nice of you to join us.”

It is impossible to miss the way Chloe rolls her eyes. Beca loves it. It makes her wonder how many other traits Chloe now has that she has assimilated over the years.   
  
“As if I was going to miss this.” The champagne glasses are placed on a side table as Chloe’s fingers reach out to brush over a loose strand of Beca’s wavy brown hair. “That song still makes me tear up. It’s… hearing you sing it is so special, Bec.” She pauses then and Beca takes a moment to drink in the sight before her. Chloe, her auburn hair tied in a chic but messy bun. It is possible to spot the scar that runs along the side of her scalp, but only if you know where to look. And Beca does. She knows a lot of things these days.

“I’m proud of you.” Chloe pauses as Beca takes in her words. Her eyes light up as she smiles and Beca watches, never again wanting to miss even the smallest moment. “I love you.”

“I love you too. So, so much.”

Maybe it was supposed to be a quick kiss, but Beca’s hand reaches out to take Chloe’s as their lips meet. She pulls her close and slows their kiss, luxuriating in every movement of their embrace.

She can. She can because she has Chloe.

Because Chloe is healthy and Chloe is hers.

For a moment, Beca pulls away, if only for the opportunity to kiss her again.

Nothing else matters. She could gladly do this and only this for the rest of her life. Everything else can wait.

After all, they’ve got time.


End file.
